Bangalore to Chennai to Bristol to...

If this (what I'm reading now) were a movie, I'd put it on fast forward and probably doze off in five minutes.

I hate abandoning a book. I think sooner or later, things will pick up , and it gets better and better as you get into the story and its all good from there.

But this... this is really testing my patience. And the last book by Eggers I read was so brilliant , that I cannot imagine that the same person wrote this...

Here, feel my pain..

"The path was now dotted with large flat rocks, like overturned dinner plates, and we were jumping from rock to rock, and doing so at a speed that I should have found alarming but somehow didn't, and we were barefoot, which might have increased the alarm but instead made it easier, because the rocks were smooth, and cool, and my bare feet would land on the rock and kind of wrap around it, simian-like, in a way that a shoe or sneaker or sandal couldn't. [that is one sentence] I swear my toes were grabbing for me, and that my skin was attaching to the rock surface in a way that only meant collusion between natural things - in this case, feet and smooth green-grey rocks. [oh puhlees, you're just a walking barefoot on rocks, don't get all back-to-nature about it] There was no time to think, which was plenty of time - I had a few fractions of a second in mid air, between rocks, to calculate the location of the next rock-landing options, the stability of each, the flattest surface among them.My brain and legs and feet all working at top speed, at the height of their respective games - it was thrilling and I was proud for them, for us. [now comes the longest sentence ever] I had the thought, while running, without breaking stride, that I would like to be doing this forever, that thought occuring while I almost landed on a very sharp rock but adjusted quickly enough to avoid it in favor of a nearby and more rounded rock , and while I was congratulating myself on having made such a perfect rock-landing choice, I was also rethinking my thought about jumping on rocks forever, because that would probably not be all that fun after a while, involving as it did a certain amount of stress, probably too much - and then, I thought , how odd it was to be thinking about running forever along the rounded gray rocks of this corner of Senegal - was this Popenguine? Mbour? - while I was in fact running along them, and how strange it was that not only could I be calculating the placement of my feet in midrun, but also be thinking of my future as a career or eternal rock-runner, and noting the thinking about that at the same time."

That was four sentences from the book.. Four painful sentences. Well okay, the thoughts are nice and all that, but its just all too self conciously casual and trying too hard to be all natural and stuff. I think there is some serious editing missing...

I oh-so want to put this book away...