Only twice before have I given up on a book. This time it was A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder by James de Mille. (The other two books were For Whom the Bell Tolls and Mists of Avalon.)
What stopped me was not the dated language — in fact I rather enjoyed that at first — no, it was them endless repetition of the same basic facts. One can only say “they loved death and hated life” so many different ways before it becomes tiring. And tiring it has become.
I’ll confess another hindrance: psychology.
When reading an ebook of short fiction, one expects the stories to, in fact, be short. Unfortunately, this ebook, The Golden Age of Science Fiction Volume VIII: An Anthology of 50 Short Stories does not indicate how long each “short” story is. Once I found out that Copper Cylinder was 291 pages long in the original, the wind was taken out of my sail.
I’d love to know how the book ends, but I just can’t make it.
