A series of underwhelming books...

I don't know what it is, but lately I've been reading some real bombs. I finished two really great books (Divergent by Veronica Roth and Simply Irresistible by Susan Elizabeth Phillips) and was really on a high after those two...but now I've hit a wall. I've gotten about 100 pages in to both of these books and my concentration was going 5 different ways both times. Maybe it's because I'm stockpiling all the books I'm jazzed about for my upcoming vacation, but these were real snoozes for me...

The Tender Bar by J.R. Moehringer
The author is a Pulitzer Prize winner, so the writer definitely  has the chops to write a great book. And I've read several reviews with people GUSHING about this book. But for whatever reason, I couldn't get into this. This is essentially a story about a boy who grew up without a father and found his fatherly influences at a neighborhood bar. Sounds great, right?! I'm sure it is...but I couldn't get into it.

Rank: Unfinished.

Summary: The Tender Bar is the story of a young man who knows his father only as "The Voice," of a single mother struggling to make a better life for her son, and of a riotously dysfunctional family from Long Island. But more than anything else, Moehringer's book is a homage to the culture of the local pub. That's where young J.R. seeks out the companionship of male role models in place of his absent father, where he receives an education that has served him well in his career and where, inevitably, he looks for love, bemoans its absence and mourns its loss.Moehringer grew up in Manhasset, a place, he writes, that "believed in booze." 

At a young age, he became a regular—not a drinker, of course, for he was far too young. But while still tender of years, he was introduced to the culture, to the companionship and—yes—to the romance of it all. "Everyone has a holy place, a refuge, where their heart is purer, their mind clearer, where they feel close to God or love or truth or whatever it is they happen to worship," he writes. For young J.R., that place was a gin mill on Plandome Road where his Uncle Charlie was a bartender and a patron.

The Last Days of Dogtown by Anita Diamant
Because I enjoyed Diamant's other book, The Red Tent, I assumed I would equally enjoy this book. No. I didn't. The summary sounded really promising, but as I got further into the book...there went my interest. I expected the book to be a little juicier, but instead it seemed a little gray. I have put this book in my bag to take to the used book store.

Rank: Unfinished.

Summary: Inspired by the settlement of Dogtown, Diamant reimagines the community of castoffs—widows, prostitutes, orphans, African-Americans and ne'er-do-wells—all eking out a harsh living in the barren terrain of Cape Ann. Black Ruth, the African woman who dresses like a man and works as a stonemason; Mrs. Stanley, who runs the local brothel, and Judy Rhines, an unmarried white woman whose lover Cornelius is a freed slave, are among Dogtown's inhabitants who are considered suspect—even witches—by outsiders. Shifting perspectives among the various residents (including the settlement's dogs, who provide comfort to the lonely), Diamant brings the period alive with domestic details and movingly evokes the surprising bonds the outcasts form in their dying days.