Follow Friday - Public Law 111-118 Was the Department of Defense Appropriation for Fiscal Year 2010

It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:

1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - The Mile Long Bookshelf and Hardcore Heroines.
3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

And now for the Follow Friday Question: How do you handle a book you don’t like? Do you DNF or do you power through?

As I have mentioned in previous posts on this blog, I am something of an obsessive completionist. If I start a book, I'm almost certain to complete it. Much of the time, this proves to have been a quixotic endeavor - the book remains bad to the end and the only real satisfaction I can get out of the process is to write a review talking about the problems I had with the book. In the end, the only enjoyable part of the reading process that involves a bad book is the catharsis of putting into words why no one else should read that particular book.

However, just often enough, a book that I am struggling with breaks through at some point, and turns out that it wasn't a bad book after all. Samuel R. Delany's Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is an example of this sort of book. I started Stars in My Pocket three times, got about a hundred pages into it each time, and set the book aside as incomprehensible. But when I went back yet again to try it, and I was able to push past the first hundred or so pages, the elements of the book fell in to place and by the end I was very happy that I had read it. Unfortunately, not every author can have the talent of Samuel R Delany, and so most books that start of as incomprehensible stubbornly remain so to their bitter ends. But there are enough books that seem weak for the first measure of pages turn that out to be worthwhile by the time their conclusions roll around that I keep obstinately grinding through all of the books I start, even if they seem bad at first.

Go to previous Follow Friday: The Mystery of Element 117 Is a Science Fiction Story by Milton Smith

Go to subsequent Follow Friday: Port 119 Is the Default for Unencrypted NNTP Connections

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