Books I Haven’t Finished Reading

The book report is a staple of the education system, despite the fact that there’s little you can add in your report that hasn’t been said before, and your mistrusting teacher will fact-check to see if you copied and part of your report in part or in whole. If you’re like me, you didn’t even bother reading some of the books you were assigned, or gave up halfway. It’s a habit I carried through Elementary school to 400 level university courses. Even today, I’ll start reading, then decide the book isn’t worth my time and toss it in a pile.

With my tablet and Google Books, I can increase that habit a thousand-fold. I’ve been meaning to read quite a few copies of classic novels I downloaded, but I haven’t had much luck. The most recent casualty is a book titled, “Ghost Stories,” written by a man with the unlikely old-timey name of Felix Octavius Carr Darley.

It’s essentially a book of ghost stories that aren’t ghost stories. Hence: false advertisement. It’s a 200+ page short story collection trying to debunk belief in ghosts by telling 2+ page stories about haunted houses where the real culprit is really the family dog, or a drunken brother. It’s like Scooby-Doo without all the Scooby Snacks and rubber masks. Basically they’re scary stories that aren’t scary and there’s a narrative at the end of each story explaining how it was never a ghost, but an equally unlikely situation that was responsible for each haunting. CASE CLOSED! Really, the book is an asshole. I don’t know if books themselves can be assholes, or it’s the author, but this book is an asshole. It reminds me of those books I read as a kid like Encyclopaedia Brown that were full of two-page mysteries you were supposed to solve yourself before reading the solution, which made less sense than what you’d been thinking of. Also, since the stories are all made up, it’s not like it’s using any factual evidence to debunk myths, like Mythbusters does. The author could have taken the time to research real incidents, since he’s claiming that the belief in ghosts and stories about them are commonplace. That doesn’t happen. The whole time you’re reading this book you’re thinking, “You know what would have been better than there not being a ghost? If there’d been a ghost. That would be interesting.” If you took this book, edited out the last few paragraphs about how stupid everyone in the story was for thinking there was a ghost, and have them be violently ripped to shreds by hands from Hell, then you’d have a book.

Ironically, having died in 1888, the author is now a ghost.