One of those books that, after reading it, I question not just why I read it, but why we read books in general, why books even exist, what the whole project of fiction is about.

Not that it was a bad book at all; it was well-enough constructed, well-enough expressed, certainly novel in various ways, not cliched. But it was odd; sort of I don't know maybe stitched together from disparate and not particularly compatible parts, so that I felt like I'd been perhaps hopping from stone to stone in a pond, and ended up at one edge of the pond where the stones seemed to end, but not with any sense of having gotten anywhere.

We say, I say, that stories are one of the most important things we do, one of the most human, the thing that we are always doing and can't help but doing. But there are some books, and this is one, where after reading it I somehow am skeptical about all of that. What, really, was all of that about?