Brain failure? Sleepless nights? Seasonal affective disorder? Who knows? But we abandoned two books in midstream when we should have been gorging or stuffing. Or – and this may really have something to do with it – should have been writing. Whatever. (And how we will miss whatever when it no longer works) We were sure we would love Peter Carey whom we have loved in the past, but The Chemistry of Tears sent us screaming from the room within 30 pp. when it became too clear that the curator of automatons at a London museum was not our kind of protagonist. 
And then we wanted so to like Peter Orner because we are all for Midwestern writers in general and Chicago writers in particular, but within 30 pages it threatened to be Saul Bellow on the North Shore and we almost went back to the curator of automatons, but we came to our senses and fired up the Roku for hours and hours of commercial-free Top Gear and 30 Rock. And we eventually broke the back of the looming writing assignment although it’s nowhere near right.
-Nemo Wolfe
