Sometimes I read books everyone else loves and wonder if something is wrong with me.
Take The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx, for example. It won the Pulitzer Prize. My friend recommended it to me because she enjoyed it.
But I read it and thought it was horrible. Boring. Uneventful. Slightly a waste of time. I think this goes to show you I have absolutely no taste in reading and should stick to young adult books.
The Shipping News follows thirty-six-year-old Quoyle as his cheating wife dies in a car crash and he heads back to his family’s ancestral home in Newfoundland. Quoyle accidentally ended up in a newspaper career and isn’t really good at it. He’s a dad who loves his daughters but doesn’t know what to do with them. The reader follows his slightly boring life, and then it just ends.
Even writing a review of this book is uneventful. E. Annie Proulx writes beautifully, so that’s a redeeming quality. It took a while for me to get into a rhythm with her style–she’s a bare-bones writer where every single word has importance–and her sentences are packed full of story. But even that wasn’t enough for me to like The Shipping News. The story is just boring. The end.
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