ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

I bought this book, as I frequently do, based on my assessment of the contents as judged by the cover. In this case, I didn’t even peek inside to determine what the book would be about, simply assuming that it would be both meaningful and interesting because I so liked the image of thick clouds and mountains on the cover.

According to the New York Times blurb on the cover, the book “has the power to exalt the reader” and I assume it is not exercising this power because I read less than five pages before deciding I hate it. I generally don’t like books where the author tries to be artistic by thumbing his nose at traditional English convention. And I’m not talking about dialectic writing. Stephen King does that and I love him. But I picked up this book and realized quickly that the author has not used any quotation marks to delineate dialogue, which I simply can’t stand. It might just be some psychotic mental tic on my part, because it’s not hard to follow or anything. But after I saw that the whole book was like this I didn’t think I could finish. I don’t have any idea what it’s about other than that someone named Guthrie woke up two boys age nine and ten and fed them some breakfast and said he had to go to the school early. From this I know that he is a teacher, which makes it even more unacceptable that none of his speech is correctly punctuated. I checked the rest of the book and yep, it’s all like that.

I think it’s okay to leave out quotations in situations where you want things to seem rather distanced or surreal somehow, like in a dream sequence or something. But I know that I can’t read a whole book with no quotation marks. So I think I just have to register this one and–this is a shocking move for me–pass it on without reading it first. I’m just not strong enough, even though I do truly want to know what happens when he goes to the school and what all this stupid book is even about.