Until I met this one. I gave up on Pride and Prejudice and Zombies last night after Lizzie threatened to gut Darcy and choke him with his own bowels one time too many. Look, I'm not squeamish, or prudish, nor do I lack a sense of humour, but this book just hit all the wrong notes for me.

Pride and Prejudice is an awesome book, so I figured adding zombies would make it even more awesome, but actually it made it a lot worse. Not only is not no longer a sweet, sharp, funny comedy of manners, it's also not a good zombie romp. I don't think Grahame-Smith gave a lot of genuine thought as to how a zombie plague would really affect Regency England (the country's overrun with zombies but Mrs Bennet's main concern is still who will marry her daughters? ORLY?), and the zombie portions are often bloodless and without humour. The goriest part of the book (as far as I read) was when Lizzie slaughters three ninjas in Lady Catherine's dojo, and all this scene did was highlight how little attention Grahame-Smith had paid to Lizzie's character in the original. Or any of the characters, in fact. Jane is apparently one of the deadliest zombie killers in the land, but she's still too shy to tell Bingley she loves him. Kitty and Lydia are supposedly equally skilled at killing zombies, but still more interested in balls and soldiers. And Caroline Bingley is more interested in drooling after Darcy than the zombies chomping on her waiting staff at the Netherfield ball, which is just stupid. All the truly funny material is Austen's.

And yeah, you can go on about pastiches and parodies and all that crap. And yeah, the book did hit the NYT bestseller list, so Grahame-Smith clearly knows more than me on how to write a book. I don't care. I've come to the conclusion that Pride and Prejudice is a good enough book on its own that it doesn't need this treatment. And zombies are a funny enough subject matter that they don't need to be crammed into Pride and Prejudice.

So I was reading Jessica Andersen's Nightkeepers last week, a book that sounded supremely cool, being packed with cults, 2012 conspiracies and Mayan myths. Unfortunately I gave up about 100 pages from the end having lost all desire to continue. One of the characters in the book describes herself as being a lot of hard work for not much reward, which sums up how I felt about the book nicely. I know when you're starting a series there's a need to lay the foundations for the world, introduce all the important characters, etc ... but really, I just didn't have the energy to see this one through. No offence to Ms Andersen, who's clearly a highly intelligent woman, but Nightkeepers takes itself way too seriously and became pretty tedious as a result.

I also wasn't convinced by the main romance plot. The two characters constantly talked about how their romance was more than just the whole "fated-to-mate" thing, but I never saw anything that convinced me of it. As a result the whole "I love you, but I must avoid you!" thing got rather stale.

I don't like not finishing books; it seems a waste of money. But more and more often I find myself tossing them aside. I struggled to finish Twilight, which most of the rest of the world adores. I couldn't even get halfway through Lord of the Fading Lands, which again everyone else seems to love. Is it just me? Am I too picky and impatient?