Thanks, I'll pass...

I received a suggestion that I periodically share what books I started reading but ended up not completing for one reason or another. I thought about it and I kind of like that idea. Hence this post.

Now, in this case I really wanted to like both of them but just couldn't. Here's why . . .

*****
Frankenstein I have loved, Dracula I have hated.

Actually, perhaps "hate" is an overly emphatic. I can't really hate it because I wanted to like it. Recently I read Frankenstein (linked) and I was surprised by how much it was not at all scary. Rather, I found it to be completely fascinating! I figured if I were that surprised by Frankenstein, there was a chance I'd also like Dracula. Lo and behold, one of the gals from my in-town book club selected it for the month of April and so I found myself with the perfect opportunity to read it.

While Frankenstein didn't scare me at all, Dracula managed to thoroughly creep me out.

In a nutshell, the reason I didn't like it was because it was very dark and evil. Stoker writes of how the evil of the vampire is a demonic evil which invades its victims. The way he describes the undead was just a little too intense for me. I don't like being scared, period. Also, I don't take spiritual warfare issues very lightly and this book is really a battle of good and evil in the truest spiritual sense. On the one hand, that can make for interesting reading (if you can hack it). The spirit world is in full play and the way Stoker describes the invasion and changing of a victim's body just made my blood run a little too cold. I was hopeful to see the book through to the end, but one night I woke up and the shadows on my bedroom window freaked me out and I decided that enough was enough. I really needed to stop reading it and so I did.

I do want to be clear on this one that I don't think this book ought to be avoided, necessarily. Obviously, it being a classic it has stood some test of time and there is a lot of discussion which can be drawn from the way the characters battle against evil. This one I set aside as being too dark for me personally.

One extra note: as a result of reading this one, I was made aware of some themes in the book that some people have drawn away from the book involving sexuality and rape. Tim talks about this in his review (if you are interested). Quite frankly, I don't see that at all. I understand how someone could draw away talk of rape from this book. However,  I also think that if they focus on this theme, their minds are where they shouldn't be because it's sort of hard to draw that out. One of the scenes in the book involves killing a female member of the undead (this was, in fact, the scene which caused me to stop reading) and has prompted discussions of what the author was intending to communicate. I only walked away from that scene with the intensely clear impression that this book describes spiritual warfare and demonic influences and described nothing at all that was sexual.

It really is not an arguable point that Stroker had a skill for writing vividly. In the case of vampires, I can do without.

And as a minor aside, I now really, really, really don't understand the fascination with the Twilight series. Vampires are scary, nasty, horrible things. I wouldn't fancy falling in love with one.

Moving on . . .

*****
I mentioned that I had accepted The Apple Orchard for review. The reason I was drawn to it in the first place can be discerned from the description (in this case, stolen from the publisher's description):

Tess Delaney makes a living restoring stolen treasures to their rightful owners. But Tess’s own history is filled with gaps: a father she never met, a mother who spent more time traveling than with her daughter. So Tess is shocked when she discovers the grandfather she never knew is in a coma. And that she has been named in his will to inherit half of Bella Vista, a hundred-acre apple orchard in the magical Sonoma town called Archangel. The rest is willed to Isabel Johansen. A half sister she’s never heard of. Against the rich landscape of Bella Vista, Tess begins to discover a world filled with the simple pleasures of food and family, of the warm earth beneath her bare feet. From one of America’s most beloved writers, The Apple Orchard is a story of family ties – both old and new – and of the moments that connect our hearts."

Tess' family history also goes back to the German occupation in Denmark and that was the nail in the coffin (OH pardon the Dracula pun!) for my wanting to read it.

I opened the book and began reading and fell in love with Susan Wiggs' style of story telling. She sets the reader up well to be very curious about Tess, her family, and how history ties in to everything. I also liked the characters, one of whom makes the following statement which I noted down:

"[I]f you don't believe memories are worth more than money, then perhaps you've not made the right kind of memories."

True, that!

So why did I opt to quit reading? Simply the fact that it contained scattered bits of mild language. It was mild but it was scattered liberally about enough so that made it difficult for me to ignore. I really don't want to be filling my head with such words. I find that when I do allow myself to read books with foul language in them, those words tend to bubble to the surface in moments of frustration. I don't want that. I think we should learn to express ourselves accurately and beautifully and so I'd rather spend my time with books that encourage me to do just that.

Sadly, I felt compelled to set this one aside. If publishers and editors would see fit to clean up their stories a bit, I sure would enjoy reading them!

In the case of The Apple Orchard I need to thank Etch Communications for allowing me an opportunity to read this one! I do regret to say that I couldn't finish it.