Too Long; Didn't Read; Except I Did: And Now I'm Fucking Cranky About It

Marlon James' A Brief History of Seven Killings won the Booker Prize and got good reviews, or at least the type of review that explains what the book is about without really critically addressing it, which is obviously a type of "review," but is more like an abstention.

That kind of thing is some fuckery: those readers unlucky enough to read things for pleasure are shortchanged the knowledge they need to decide whether to read the thing in the first place. But no matter.

Here's what I would say you need to know: Killings is audacious, rich, wide-ranging and a complete fucking chore to read. And then there's this — which is a complete spoiler but no one is going to finish the thing so what would it matter? — which is that after 686 some-odd-bombocloth pages there's no fucking goddamn ending, and then the acknowledgements talk about how a lot of the great research one of James' four (!) researchers did will appear in the next book. Next book? Call me old fashioned, but I like to see A STORY RESOLVE IN SOME WAY, SHAPE OR FORM AFTER 686 MOTHERFUCKING PAGES. This ending is truly an elliptical "to be continued"; it's clear in the final part that the main female character is going to intersect in some way with the main male character BUT THE GODDAMN MOTHERFUCKING BOOK ENDS BEFORE THAT HAPPENS. Seriously. Seriously. Seriously, what the fuck?

Add to that that the book is written in a first-person active voice from the perspective of like 15 or 20 people — think As I Lay Dying times three or four (literally) — and you see why IT'S SUCH A FATIGUING SLOG.

So you know what? The best way to combat an overlong book is to not allow it to invade your mental space any more than it has to. So, the end.