On a blog mostly about children’s books may…

On a blog mostly about children’s books, may I use WTF? to describe my final reaction to book 70? I just did! Reading through the book, repulsed and confused for the most part, I was hoping that perhaps the final scenes/chapters/resolution would have wrap the story up and give me some worthwhile reason to have to wade through the entire book so my small “wtf’s” can combine and become a big “Oh, I GET it!! Wow… so brilliant… ” but… um… nope… it left me with a STRONGER sense of lament: of wasted time (which could have been spent on reading more enjoyable or revelatory books.) But, a nagging doubt is pulsing in my mind, too — perhaps this IS the most brilliant book of 2012: it surely is the most different book, with its surreal and totally repulsive settings and major events, its unapologetically non-scientifically sound explanations of WHY the beings exist, and its host of characters that perhaps are meant to be allegorically significant but my feeble mind simply cannot grasp all their meanings. I need time and discussion to make sense of the book and why some readers seem to think it highly worthy. (One possible worthiness comes from demanding readers to unpack the emotional and ethical turmoil of the main character and the other might be that it does not offer easy two-tone answers: nothing seems entirely black or entirely white. ) There are definitely gaping holes (both emotional and logical) in the telling and those are what, to me, eventually, bring down the worthiness of the book.