Books That Won’t Make Me Smarter

I've been sporadically plowing through The Classics on my list of Books to Make Me Smarter, like Atlas Shrugged and Anna Karenina. But now people think I know how to read, so they give me books.

It all started with The Fault In Our Stars. While it was a good (and relatively fun) read, SAD.

Staying on the teen lit train, along came Divergent. Better than Twilight, not as good as Hunger Games, DEPRESSING AS HELL.

Then I received Cutting For Stone. STOP THE INSANITY.

A trip to the book store was in order. I picked up the book I had started at my brother-in-law's wedding last year while hiding in the bathroom from the immeasurable family: The Life of Pi. I was rewarded with an amazing story with an optimistic ending (or an infuriating one, depending on your take). Yay!

Let the Great World Spin, which I SWORE was on The List, also came along in my bag. The premise sounded promising: a daredevil Frenchman walks across a tightrope strung between the Twin Towers before they were quite completed; the stories of ordinary New Yorkers on the streets below intertwine around that day.

Neat.

The story of Phillipe Petit walking a fricking tightrope a quarter mile in the air is fascinating enough, and a book on simply everyone's Top 100 lists MUST be amazing, right?

No.

Hated it. With only glimmers of hope or happiness for a select few (like, 2?) characters, and a mere handful of pages describing the unbelievable walk in the sky, the book made me want to turn to Tolstoy for lightness.

Let me repeat that: I wanted to turn to a classic Russian writer from the 1800s for levity.

It made me more bitter, after reading the whole dismal book, to find that Let the Great World Spin was NOT on my book list.

Bah.

Humbug.