If you read a lot of mystery – or a lot of any sort of book, do you need to take a vacation from it every so often? I know I do but I never know quite when I’m going to need the break. I wish I could predict or identify warning signs of mystery overdose because when it hits it hits fairly hard and fast and suddenly, damn, I don’t like anything I’m reading and I don’t like THIS character and I don’t like THAT series. And sometimes it’s overreaction, which you have to watch out for; catch it before it spoils something for good, right?

I open just about every book with the hope that I will like it. Some of that is informed by experience of course; I liked his last one, I liked everyone in this series to date, I’ve heard such good things from people I trust about her stuff. Sometimes it’s iffier but still hopeful; she convinced me to try her again, someone said it really wasn’t like his other stuff, or that it WAS like his old stuff (ok, that last is Robert B Parker and no, it’s not. So stop trying to convince me, I ain’t reading any more Spenser books. And I don’t think he can write women worth a damn. And I still adore early Parker. So leave me alone. Snarf.)

But I went straight from “everything’s fine here, nothing to see, move along” to a full scale multicar pileup reading disaster in the last couple of weeks. This not only included dumping a book because I thought everyone in it seemed stupid (not, I’m sure what the author intended) but ending a book by a long time favorite with utter annoyance. This series (and no, of course I’m not naming it – for one thing the author is a friend, okay?) which I’ve read for years just stopped being readable with the new book. Why? Because everyone in this book – and maybe it’s been like that for a while and I hadn’t noticed – all the good guys are SO GOOD, they are so loveable and smart and they never are wrong and the kids are adorable and the adults are handsome and dashing and the sex is fabulous and the solution is perfect and….okay, I am exaggerating. But not much. You know how they say Sayers fell in love with Wimsey? I feel suddenly with this book like the author has fallen in love with all the author’s creations. No one can do any wrong if they are good guys. Bad guys are so obviously evil and good guys are just perfect in every way.

I don’t like perfect and I don’t trust it. No one is perfect. My favorite characters, my favorite PEOPLE aren’t perfect. Perfect scares me – it makes me wonder what that person is on and what happens when they go blooey? Do you know them? The ones who are always happy and smiling? I still remember, a long long time ago, someone I worked with who seemed never to stop smiling. She smiled all the time, even when you were pointing out to her “no I wasn’t done with that, and I told you that very clearly, so you KNEW to leave it alone and instead you ignored me and messed up my work because you weren’t willing to wait until I was done.” And still she smiled. Jesus. If she ever got in touch with herself, I thought she’d end up screaming without end, possibly forever. I wonder what happy drugs people like that are on, or how big the denial is that they live in. Doesn’t her face hurt?

Years ago a friend used as a measure of “the perfect protagonist” whom she said she couldn’t read and didn’t trust the example of a woman who never had a period. And that example just stopped me in my tracks because they do exist. Oh so many of them. Women who never have a bad day, who you cannot imagine ever dealing with anything “messy” in their lives. No ick.

Did the perfection in this book I had trouble with mean I’m through with the series? At the moment, yeah. I’ll try the next one but I’m afraid that I’ve been seeing the hints for a while and it’s come full blossom. It’s not what I expected from this author but I was just SO fed up by the end of the book. This is NOT what this series has been like but this book specifically had massive amounts of perfect goodness and I was SO dismayed. And I suspect that most folks won’t even notice and would probably think I’m just SO negative for wanting a little bit of schmutz, a little bit of annoying, a little grime in the corners, and just someone somewhere making a mistake.

Another book that failed to grab me was one by someone whose last book (the first I’d read) was pretty darn good. This one? I got maybe 30 pages before I thought that everyone here is annoying. They are annoying because (no not because they are perfect) they either believe incredibly stupid things, they are acting really stupidly. No one but the protagonist and maybe one other person has a brain and they are so surrounded by stupid sexism (how dare she have a good figure? Doesn’t she know how that tempts boys?) or desperation (let’s go look over here? We can’t get there it’s a waste of time and pointless but we let’s do it anyway even if time is of the esssense”) or well, there’s a lot of prejudice, ignorance and plain dumb stuff. And who wants to hang out with these people? Why? I know that there are clearly folks who go “oh well, I know but they’re my people, you know?”. I’m not one of them. I don’t want to take credit or accept that “my people” are nasty, stupid, blame women for men’s problems. I don’t want to hear about how someone is so upset she doesn’t listen so everyone in town ends up having to deal with her or that someone is abusive but nothing can be done about it. (This is somewhat exaggerated taken from a few incidents In what I read.) I don’t like these people, I don’t want to spend enough time among them to know how it all turns out.

And I don’t get why someone would write about them. I’m not saying I want all mysteries to be “murder at the MENSA meeting” because I know damn well how annoying smart people can be too and know that intelligence is no measure of likeability, compassion, or just plain smarts. But I don’t want to read about a law enforcement person who spends his day dealing with abusive, ignorant, horrid people. If I have a choice. Because I don’t want to be around those folks and don’t know who would. And yeah, it’s fiction but I want to spend my fiction time – my few hours in that world, caring, at some level, what happens. Sure the puzzle is often interesting and you can focus on that instead of the personalities, but it’s not that different to me from spending those few hours at a meeting, or a party, or a gathering. If I ended up at a party where these people were holding forth, I’d be out of there SO FAST there would be “whoosh” lines visible in the air, just like I was a cartoon character.

So why do people write about these folks? Do they think it’s realistic? I bet it is but so’s a lot of stuff and we don’t read/write about that. Is it funny? Ah, yep, I bet some folks think it’s funny. I remember a book some years ago that was intended to be funny where I thought all the characters again were just flat out annoying – rude, distasteful, self-absorbed, dumb - and I learned that the book was intended as satire. Oh. Oh shit. Did I miss that. I did sort of get it was meant as humor – humor which fell so flat for me – but oh, damn, it was satire? Oh. Ooops. You can’t go back, you know? You can’t go and reread something that you thought basically unfunny and then try to give it funny chops.

The third blow was the book by the really good author that I simply didn’t GET. I didn’t get the point of the book. I didn’t know WHY he told the story he told. I read the whole damn book, the guy is such a good writer and I resented it because I didn’t like the protagonist and I think he did. And I somehow feel well, sort of cheated – cheated into caring about someone who really did not deserve my sentiments.

I even recently read something that SO many people love and while I liked it, sort of, I don’t understand the passion. SO many friends praise Patrick O’Brien to the ends of the earth. I don’t quite understand books where some of the description is so opaque that you need a glossary, a concordance, at least a list of terms and it’s not there. I can get a lot of stuff “in context”; in fact it drives me rather batty when folks post on DorothyL a question about a single word in a book that a) you can find on Bartleby.com usually or just by typing it into “Google” or using a print dictionary. And often it doesn’t matter anyway; you can slide by, saying “ok, so he had lunch at the pub” or “ok, so she got dressed”. Even “oh, he must have insulted that other guy really badly.” But it’s semi-obvious, it’s in context, it’s got a meaning I can sort of guess at. But here, not so. At least not for me. So I either have to spend your reading time with a dictionary next to me (which I happen not to enjoy – and I was reading this one while at Bouchercon anyway – no dictionary no computer next to me) or skip stuff. So I skipped entire pages, passages, possibly even chapters in MASTER AND COMMANDER because I so didn’t get which sail was where (even with the drawing in the beginning of the book) and didn’t care. And don’t give a crap for battle scenes. But everyone says “it’s about the characters, it’s about Maturin and Aubrey”. But it wasn’t always or it wasn’t about them often enough for me; it was about fighting and parts of the ship, and different kinds of ships that are called all sorts of different things (and me not really understanding if that mattered or not.) And it felt at times as if the author wanted me to be baffled and not understand what he was telling me, that if I really cared I’d go get The Big Book of Historical Nautical Terms and Greetings and Daily Talk and Stuff and study up. I didn’t want footnotes, mind you, just the option of looking stuff up when it clearly was not twentieth century English or even comprehensible Historical English – if such a thing exists. I mean I’ve read other historical novels that didn’t put me at a major disadvantage – somehow the author managed to educate or inform me without letting the story pall but here, if I didn’t just skip large pieces of chapters, I felt stupid, as if I should have known what was being discussed.

The result here is that I’m a little skittish, a little gun-shy about what to pick up next because I don’t know if it’s just those books or if I’m suffering from Temporary Mystery Overdose Syndrome. So I haven’t picked up a new book in a couple of days. And I’ve got a trip to make next week where I’ll need a bunch of books. And it makes me very nervous to think that I won’t be out of this mood.