I read in one sitting on January 1st Caroline Darian’s memoirs (in Spanish translation by Lydia Vázquez) Y dejé de llamarte papa (2025, Et j’ai cessé de t’appeler Papa). Caroline’s actual surname is Pelicot, but she is using a mixture of her brothers’ names (David and Florian) for her penname. In this touching book she narrates how their monstrous father destroyed their family when he subjected under chemical submission his wife Gisèle to hundreds of rapes, by him and by 73 other men (50 of whom have been sentenced). Caroline and Gisèle are no longer in speaking terms, as the mother refuses to accept that the daughter was, if not raped, at least molested by Dominique, the father (the police showed both photos that prove Caroline is also a victim). I found Caroline’s brief book bold, well-written and necessary. I intend to read, as well, Gisèle’s memoirs, not out of morbid curiosity but as a student of patriarchal men’s villainy.
So, 2026 started very well but my reading quickly went downhill. I must have broken a personal record because yesterday I gave up on seven novels (fortunately for me, all of them borrowed from my local library). I have decided not to mention titles and names, because my difficulties to find engaging books might have more to do with my problems with focusing on fiction than with the novels themselves.
After Darian’s memoirs, I started reading a well-received 2013 novel by a South Korean woman author (no, she’s not Nobel Prize winner Han Kang) dealing with a female employee in a travel agency specialized in disaster tourism. The novel started quite well but, halfway through, the plot started to sag. The novelist has her Korean protagonist fall in love with a local young man on a Vietnamese island, which seemed a good idea, but their romance starts very abruptly to be credible; besides, the writer forgets to clarify in which language her characters speak (apparently, the protagonist picks up Vietnamese overnight). Absurdly, the protagonist makes nothing of collaborating in a plot to murder hundreds of natives to stage a fake catastrophe intended to boost the island’s dwindling income from disaster tourism. I read a bit more but could not swallow the last 25 pages out of just 200 hundred. No way, not even to add yet another title to my personal reading list. It must be the first time I find myself unable to finish a novel so close to the ending. It’s frustrating because I have gained nothing by trying to read this novel, except the topic to fill this paragraph.
Next day, I started a non-fiction volume by Spanish science historian Juan Pimentel, titled El rinoceronte y el megaterio (2010). I’m a very omnivorous reader and this book promises to be one of my favourite reads of 2026. It is, however, a bit dense, and 50 non-stop pages into it I decided to halt and start reading a novel, which is when disaster struck. I spent close to three hours reading first chapters of six of the seven novels, and, sorry, going through countless negative reviews on GoodReads.
I started with a brief novel by a celebrated Danish woman novelist, who has announced she will eventually publish seven volumes in the same series. The problem is that this woman has not seen Harold Ramis’s brilliant 1993 movie Groundhog Day, nor have, apparently, the reviewers who believe she has hit on an original premise. Well, she has not. Her protagonist, who runs a business selling 17th century books with her husband, suddenly finds herself stuck on the same day again and again. It’s not a particularly exciting day and she is a singularly dull woman. It took me about 30 pages to be bored out of my wits (again, this was quite a short volume) and I gave up. I also abandoned a novel by another Nordic writer, in this case Swedish, supposed to be the beginning of a very funny saga. Twenty pages into the English translation, I already saw it was a very unfunny novel, or a kind of humour I did not get.
Next, I took a 1971 minor SF US classic, which I quickly discarded when the male protagonist boasted about being able to choose among three young, beautiful women in love with him (and bickering for his attention). No thanks. So, I tried a very long historical novel by a best-selling English author, with dozens of characters from several families, and ambitious enough to attempt to narrate both WWI and the Russian Revolution. I started reading and I found in the first chapter a blatant rip off of Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley, except that it started with a 13-year-old checking on the day of his birthday (also his first in the mines of his Welsh hometown) whether his ‘peter’ was already that of a man. No thanks. Also, this famous writer uses a very bland prose and treats his readers as morons who have no idea about history, or even general culture.
Then, I gave up on a highly praised novel by a young Spanish novelist, which I had already tried to read a month ago. I borrowed it again from the library after reading that this young man is being harassed online for being gay and for his approach in this novel to the Spanish Civil War. I didn’t even start it. A brutal review in GoodReads did such a thorough demolition job that I decided not to try again. The idea of using magical realism to narrate the tragic Spanish Civil War did not appeal much to me to begin with, and this GoodReads reviewer convinced me that, even if I managed to start the novel, I would not read all of its 700 pages.
So, I turned to an older Spanish novel, published in 2007 and today acclaimed as one of the best works of the 21st century in Spain. The problem with this novel is typical of Spanish literature: stream of consciousness needs to reflect the personality of the character, and exclude any literary flourishes by the author. This character, a corrupt builder from the Mediterranean coast, however, thinks as a literary novelist. The author overwhelms readers with pages and pages and pages of the man’s banal thoughts peppered with clever phrasing but with no paragraphs. It seems that later monologues by other characters don’t even have punctuation, but I stopped before putting myself through this kind of postmodern torture.
Finally, I abandoned a novel by an acclaimed Irish novelist for a similar reason. The novel combines the secret diary of a 100-year-old woman locked up in a psychiatric asylum since her youth, and the reports by her psychiatrist, who needs to choose which patients must be transferred elsewhere before the degraded institution closes. I could see immediately how these two characters are connected beyond their being doctor and patient but, well, I don’t mind much spoilers. What killed my interest is that I could not suspend my disbelief and accept that what the novelist offers is how a very old woman, disconnected from mundane life for very long, would write. The idea, besides, that she could write for hours on end without anyone discovering her was just preposterous.
By the time I gave up on this novel, it was well past midnight and I didn’t return to Pimentel’s essay, which I will continue reading as soon as I finish writing this post.
Whenever I tell my friends about my problems to find attractive novels, they always recommend some they have enjoyed, but this is no help. All the novels I’ve described here were recommended to me, one way or another, both by professional and amateur reviewers. Perhaps the problem is that the reason why I read and the reason why novelists write no longer match. I read to learn in general about life and, specifically, to share human experience. The novelists seem, however, more focused on their own careers, whether they see them as a commercial or a creative concern, but are not very interested in reaching out to readers. For very different reasons, Caroline Darian and Juan Pimentel do want to communicate with their readers: she has painful personal reasons to do so, he is fascinated by a topic within his professional remit. I don’t find that urgency and passion in novels anymore. They seem to me perfunctory, particularly the ones published in recent decades, which, besides, tend to be much overhyped by the book industry and by readers, both seeking the next big thing. And they are mostly very boring.
Possibly, this is the curse of the ageing reader, for the more you read, the harder it is to find a fully satisfactory novel (thank you writers for non-fiction!). I’m, however, at a loss to explain what I’m looking for in a novel. It’s not, definitely, a particular topic, for, as noted, I’m very omnivorous. Or a style. I just don’t want to feel that I’m reading. I want to disappear into the novels I read, and avoid that crushing boredom. I want to stop finding myself agreeing with the negative reviews on GoodReads. Either the novel is dying in the 21st century or I’ve totally lost my taste for novels. It’s possibly a mixture of both… Aren’t you curious about the titles and authors of the seven novels I gave up on the same evening…? Or have you already guessed?