I’m not sure how this happened. I had a perfectly respectable book lined up to follow last week’s reading of Kindred as part of my 52 Books by 52 Women challenge. I was all set to read Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices,
because I figured a book by an Indian author set in the East Bay would be right up my alley. And I started reading it, but man, I just did not like it at all. The faux-mythic self-description of the first-person narrator, the sentence fragments, the aversion to question marks—I just found it all tedious and off-putting. (I hadn’t liked the movie much either, but that wasn’t necessarily an indication of how much I’d like the book; I mean, The Age of Innocence was a lousy movie but a good book.) So I figured it just wasn’t my time to read this book and picked something else up.
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