I'm Sorry, Nicole Krauss.

She had recommended it to me, so I felt obliged to read it. Nicole Krauss's A History of Love. I tried. I tried to make myself like it. I really did. From the start, it sounded too much like a bad Jonathan Safran Foer knock-off. To me, she just missed the mark with this story. The language at first sounds beautiful and deep and unique and what everyone wants in a book, yet it gets too much after a while. Just an overusage of an attempt to be special and profound. The character of Leopold Gursky, with his frequent "and yet"s became an uncomfortably tedious life to follow and I felt unnerved just reading about him, as if the story was a strange man was sitting in the corner of my room, picking locks all day. Alma, to me, seemed a thoroughly unremarkable girl whose slightly obsessive list-like storytelling format became sort of obnoxious and made her side of the tale seem oddly professional and boring to read. The entire plot of the story seemed to swerve all over the place and the whole "long lost book/love" thing sounded like the all too frequent theme of so many of today's stories. I just couldn't sit with this book any longer - I found myself longing to venture back into the cabinet of our classroom and pull our something else. That's the worst thing to feel when you're reading something. And I feel guilty while writing this post. I know my teacher, who is an avid supporter of Miss Krauss, will read this, and might even be appalled by my harsh view of her book. I feel like I was supposed to like it. But I couldn't. I had to abandon it on the side of the metaphorical highway to the destination that all books hope to reach a place in the hall of fame of awesome books. But hey, now The History of Love can chill with Wuthering Heights in the ditch by Exit 3.

And on a lighter note, I am currently reading a book whose morbidly hysterical jokes will soon be featured on an "Annie's Favorite Quotes" list on the right side of my blog. Hurrah! Congratulations, A Fraction of The Whole (by Steve Toltz). You are well on your way to the mental hall of fame.