Good thing this month is almost over. I'm hoping it's that the stars are in Ca-ca to explain the number of books that are crossing the threshold chez Roscoe and just driving me a little crazy. I recently got one to review and again, struggled for close to 200 pages (yes) to read it and finally realized i couldn ot continue with this book. For one thing, i found the protagonist well, er, um, not very bright, and i thought it took way too long for things to happen (and when one finally did, I thought" well, duh, you knew 50 pages ago....") a good sign to quit.

But I still had hoped to finish the book and wondered "am I being to hard on this book" so i started flipping ahead, This is a very long mystery (I didn't really realize until this morning that it was well over 400 pages - i don't tend to read crime novels that are that long but more to the point, i don't recall getting a lot of mysteries that top 400 pages. Are there many? What are they? Do you? read them?) and i had a lot of time invested. I'd made it close to half-way through before realizing i wasn't enjoying what i was reading and kept finding annoying faults, both large and small, phrases that made no sense, or "quirks" that simply were annoying . What was it the publishers, editors, agents, saw that i didn't see?

And then i hit the stopper. The "okay, never mind". A description of the protagonist getting dressed to impress which included a description of a pair of boots with a "designer" name apparently, something I would never have recognize. And the sentence explains that the boots are"so high they'd cause a lumbar laminectomy".

And given the way this book reads, I'm sorta kinda guessing the author doesn't exactly know what that means but it sounds good.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. I've had a lumbar laminectomy and I still don't know what the hell that means.