Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

My wife and I read books out loud to each other as a way of sharing the experience. She and I have for some time been frustrated by the book selections listed each month on Amazon’s First Reads. For those of us who are not interested in reading yet another book about female angst and dysfunctional families, there are few options. The selection in December 2020 was so bad that none looked interesting. Nine of this month’s ten books are by women, and the one by a man is about a woman. We opted for Water Memory by Pyne. Big mistake! We slogged through nine chapters by a male author writing about female angst, with my wife doing most of the reading. She complained nearly every page about Pyne’s over-the-top attempts at prosaic descriptions, lack of a plot line, etc. We both did a doggy head tilt when we read what Pyne said about a major event in Nicosia, Cyprus. We have lived in Nicosia, and Pyne seems to have no idea about the political and ethnic realities there. In chapter six, he even seems to think that Cyprus is part of Greece. At the end of chapter nine, my wife looked at me and asked, “Do you really care about any of the characters in this book?” I replied, “No.” She shut off the iPad, and that was it. Will the women who choose First Reads please realize that a lot of men have Amazon Prime and stop discriminating against us! I am not saying that men cannot write interesting books about women or vice versa. David Baldacci writes about strong women. Some of his plot lines are totally implausible, and the man does not know the difference between a truck and an SUV; but his stories are interesting. We finish such books.