On stopping reading books

I normally don’t like stopping reading books- I even made it all the way through Labyrinth by the implausibly named Kate Mosse- but I knew I’d run into trouble on p. 9 Matthew Reilly’s promisingly-titled Seven Ancient Wonders where he describes Crocodylus nilocticus, the notorious Nile crocodile. Apparently it is the most man-eating crocodilian in the world. Too much excellent grammar for me.*

The book would make a passable film with an enormous special-effects budget to make up for the lack of real plot, unconvincing elite teams of ruthless military archaeologists who seem to know all the secrets of the places that haven’t been touched for millennia, reliance on drawings to describe the numerous traps they are all bound to overcome, and the excerpts from encyclopedias that don’t seem to, oh whatever: the point is don’t bother reading it; don’t waste the £1 or so I spent on it in the charity shop.

Sadly we no longer have an open fire on which I can dispose of this, so I will have to do the done thing and recycle it.

*Surely, it should be man-eatingest.