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Today’s challenge – a book you hated.

Hmm. Tough one. Again, if I don’t like the book, I usually don’t finish it. And, bluntly, I’m not a fan of the internet tendency towards negativity and snark. Plus, I already answered a negative question, with the “overrated” bit from a few days ago.

I’ll be skipping this one.

Today’s challenge: a book that reminds you of home.

Going back to childhood here. My family has a definite nautical bent. I grew up on the east end of Long Island. My family goes back to the settlement of the area, and before it became “THE HAMPTONS”, it was small fishing villages. My grandfather was a bay man, who dug clams. My brother worked as a charter boat Captain. When we were kids, we got this book, SAM AND THE JOLLY BLUE, by Betty B. Nissen (Random House, 1968).

It’s a children’s book about a down-on-his-luck fisherman, who has a trouble-making cat. Of course, the cat ends up being good luck, and after the cat tracks blue paint all over the boat, the fisherman paints the boat in those colors, and starts catching tons of fish.

It makes me think of the fishing villages, and the bay, and the ocean. Which, despite me having spent half of my life out here in the Kansas City area, on and off, still is “home” to me.

Today’s challenge — a book you thought you wouldn’t like, but ended up loving.

This is a hard one, because generally, if I don’t think I would like it, I don’t bother reading it in the first place. I don’t have time to waste on stuff that I’m not interested in.

This one was a while back, though — a book that I tried twice before to read, purely on the raves of friends. Each time, I read a bit, didn’t find it particularly compelling, and stopped. In particular, the first book’s obvious beginnings as “fantasy War of the Roses”, Starks and Lannisters standing in for York and Lancaster, pulled me right out of the narrative. It was too heavy-handed and obvious.

Then my friend Theron said — “you’ll love it.” I told him that I’d tried to get into it and couldn’t. He said “Do me a favor — just keep reading until at least page 85.”

So I did. Page 85 was the page where Bran gets thrown from the tower of Winterfell.

I ended up reading the whole thing.

Really loved it too — at least the first three books. I gave up after the fourth. By the fourth, it seemed obvious to me that Martin wasn’t being constrained by his editor any longer, and he really needed to be. What was touted as a trilogy was now exponentially growing, and I grew bored with it. I’m not sure I’m going to ever bother reading the rest (if Martin even finishes them). I’m getting a resolution via the TV series, and that’s enough closure for me.