Shelving It

I am shelving When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro. I tried really hard to plow through this book, but it was just so boring. I found myself reading two-three pages at a time and then putting it back down cause it was going nowhere. I’ve heard nothing but great things about Ishiguro, especially his book, Never Let Me Go, but when I went to the library to rent it, it wasn’t in stock. So instead I picked up Orphans, but man, I could not get through this.

The first half of the book just dragged on and on about the narrator’s life growing up in Shanghai and his recollection of his early childhood. Memory is a central theme in this book and our perceptions of our memories and how they may not be as accurate as we thought they were. Which I thought was really interesting particularly after reading my own diaries, but that was not enough to get me through this book. I finally made it to the middle and the book did a 180 and I just couldn’t be bothered to figure out where Ishiguro was going with it. Perhaps down the line I will pick up Never Let Me Go in hopes that it will be better than When We Were Orphans.