I spent time reading the novel The Raw Shark Texts that I will never get back, and I do not want to throw good time after bad by writing about it. I post this only to assuage my proto-guilt that one of y’all might squander some of your own preciously finite lives reading this book when I could have stopped you. TRST does, after all, have a cool cover, intriguing blurbs and a carefully-worked first fifty pages that get you in. But then it makes eleven bad plot decisions in a row and, in the middle, the writing rapidly oscillates between “good” and “barely above fanfic,” sometimes making a full cycle in the same sentence. I was ready to give up with 110 pages to go, but then, happily, 50 of the remaining pages turned out to be either completely or virtually blank.

The title, btw, is a pun on “Rorschach tests,” because readers are supposed to be able to take away many different readings from the book or some such. I didn’t get the pun before I started the book and, if I had, I doubt I would have opened it.