Class picture.
I often worry that I am getting stupider as I get older. When I was a kid, I used to be able to sit down and read through a two or three hundred page book in an afternoon. Now, though, I often find myself struggling to make it through twenty or thirty pages as my mind wanders off to a million places. You could argue that I read more complicated books now and I have more things on my mind. You could say that. Or you could say that I'm not very clever.
Or you could say that sometimes a book is just not that interesting. Well, to me at least.
Before I even began reading, there were already two strikes against Nothing to Fear, Adam Cohen's account of Franklin Roosevelt's first one hundred days in office. First, I had a lot of other issues to deal with this week, and was very distracted (more about that later). Second, I've read a lot about the 1930s, the New Deal, and Franklin Roosevelt's presidency. I'm far from an expert, but I'm pretty familiar with the basic timeline, the acronyms, and the cast of characters. So when I began to read and found FDR's first inauguration as the opening set piece, I immediately had that, "...again?" feeling. Again, I'm not ready to give lectures on the Great Depression, let alone able to write my own book, but I can flip through things like "There was no real plan for the New Deal...Frances Perkins's commitment to labor and workers writes was cemented when she witnessed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire...Eleanor Roosevelt's press conference showed she was going to be a different type of First Lady...Roosevelt knew he had to inspire confidence in the banks again..." It's all very good information, but not information that made me miss my train stop, if you know what I mean.
The writing is clear and everything is very concisely and easily explained. Maybe almost too easily. In a way, the book (or at least what I read of it) reminded me a bit of a very good social studies book, where all the facts are laid out in a careful, brisk, and orderly fashion; the mini-biographies of many of the cabinet members made me think of those sidebars that tell about a non-A-List person who was mentioned in the main article. I don't mean this to sound insulting--after all, I've written a fair number of social studies books, and more of those sidebar thingys than I care to remember. It is good to be able to describe something simply and clearly. I just didn't find the writing particularly transporting or compelling, though. But that's just me.
Can I make it more obvious that I don't like to say bad things about a book that was written with so much care and consideration? A book that was well-reviewed, and whose back cover has ecstatic quotes from writers I admire? A book that I...well, that I...didn't finish. Indeed, I only made it through One Hundred Pages of FDR's One Hundred Days. And it took me a whole week to do that. I hate quitting on a book, but this one IS overdue (at least I think it is--to say that the NYPL's new online catalogue is troubled is like saying it can be a bit chilly in Antarctica). And I can't renew it (well, at least the system didn't SEEM to let me renew it) because other people had it on reserve. If I don't return it now, I will no doubt be causing great mental distress to those people.
I like to think that when I return this book and that next person gets it, he or she will get a great deal more enjoyment out of it, and see all the virtues that I couldn't. Meanwhile, I have another book ready to be picked up (at least I think it's there...) and maybe that one will be able to catch the fancy of my feeble mind. After all, we have nothing to fear but not having a good book to read.
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