I am not sure which blog this post merits. The topic concerns a YA science-fiction trilogy I dropped half-way through its second book. Yet the topic here is more about how we choose to spend our time, our slow, curated time. So I think the rural-life blog is the place.
A student recommended it, and I really enjoyed the first book of the Arc of the Scythe books. The first I found fresh: instead of the typical YA dystopia, we get a flawed utopia, a perfect world of immortal humans overseen by a benevolent and sentient AI, The Thunderhead. It's a place without war, poverty, or serious crimes. If you become "deadish" you can be brought back in most cases. Climate change has been solved.
For SF that would be a boring concept, and a good novel needs tension, so we have the Scythes, a secretive order beyond The Thunderhead's power, each of them tasked to "Glean" 200 people per year. This, in theory, reduces human population and also introduces uncertainty into a perfect world.
I loved the concept. That said, I put down the second book unfinished. Reading the plot of it and the final volume proved interesting, but not enough to continue. Why?
Lately, as I enter my last 30 years on this rock, I decided to say "NO" loudly to most books, movies, or TV that people say I simply must experience. I don't get as many of these "must do" orders nowadays about books; in fact, too many friends have stopped reading books and that horrifies me.
Frankly, a good deal of what does get recommended bores me. Besides, I'm less interested in fiction now and more interested in knowing where we came from, who we were, and why we ended up the way we did. Thus, I read more histories and biographies of an academic and not popular sort. I've books on tap about the financial struggles of Mark Twain, the journal of Sir Ernest Shackleton (having read Endurance I want the man's own words), and works about America's Founding Fathers.
Yet I do continue to read fiction, including some SF. I'm in the midst of Ursula K. LeGuin's brilliant novella "Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight?" It's as fantastical as the Scythe books: a child awakens from the crash of a small plane to find herself in the company of Native-American animal spirits who pose as human beings. The characters, however, are far from flat and their motives are not fully explained (a typical narrative device that annoys me about a good deal of YA I've read).
Other fiction I've read recently has been by masters of concealment: Kazuo Ishiguro and Naguib Mahfouz. More Edith Wharton and Willa Cather (some of which I'll re-read) await me. I cannot wait to savor Cather's Death Comes For the Archbishop again; it's one of my all-time favorite novels.
My remaining years are too short to read all the books I want. If I manage one a month for the next 30 years, that's only 360 books. So it's time to choose wisely. No more fluff or formulaic stories.
What draws me to reading? The desire to learn first, or enter a fictional world where I feel completely immersed yet gets populated by characters I care about. That's where the Scythe books failed me totally. I felt no emotional connection to the good characters or the rather flat evil ones. An author can pull something off amazing by crafting a villain we find interesting. Some bestsellers do that, as with All the Light We Cannot See.
Compared to A Pale View of Hills or Midaq Alley, so many modern novels of a popular sort are like eating fast food instead of having a slow, curated feast. No more please.
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