Riders of the Purple Sage

After saying yesterday that it would be a while before I finished reading anything, here I am with an unfinished book. I'm ready to blog about it though, I really don't feel like finishing it.

I wanted to read Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey for the Genre Challenge, for which I needed a Western. This books is apparently the best-known Western classic so when I saw it on The Literature Network, I thought I'd give it a shot. I made it through about 120 pages of about 300 and I started finding excuses not to read it so I think it's time to give up.

Why didn't I like it? I didn't like the writing, for a start. I found it choppy and that distracted me, I couldn't quite get into it. I didn't like the characters either. I mean, I liked them because they are strong and good characters, but I didn't have any sort of personal connection to them. I didn't care about what they wouold do next. Since none of this got better after 9 chapters, I figured that was that.

I did enjoy reading about what life must have been like in the Wild West - the open spaces, the danger, the crime, the conflicts. So I enjoyed it from an anthropological perspective, but that's pretty much it. I don't think I'll try another book in this genre either...

Oh well. You can't like them all!

Challenges: Genre Challenge, A-Z Challenge, 999 Challenge, Classics Challenge, My Year of Reading Dangerously