Every book is a crapshoot. You can only tell so much about what’s inside from cover blurbs and reviews. You have to wade in, get acclimated, and finally — if it’s comfortable enough — you can dunk your head under and become totally submerged in the story. But that journey from knowing nothing about a book to being completely absorbed in its story is different every single time for every single book.

I’m impatient, so I’ve found that most of my favorite books are books that hook me within a few paragraphs and I don’t have to work to read them. Right now I’m fighting with this one book — The Implacable Order of Things — that is so beautiful in so many ways but also soooo tedious to read. I feel like I’ve been reading it for weeks and weeks, when I’ve really only been reading it for a week and I’m a mere 42 pages in. I’ll read a few pages and then I’ll put it down and pick up Freakonomics to read about real-estate trends cross-sectioned with the prevalence of mercury in Mississippi River catfish (okay, not really, but someone should look into that).

There’s just something about it that hasn’t grabbed me yet. But I don’t want to give up on it because the writing is objectively beautiful (José Luís Peixoto’s original text was translated to English from Portuguese by Richard Zenith) and you would hope that a writer who can spin such lovely phrases would be able to deliver on a grander scale and pull the whole story together.

The first paragraph Peixoto gives us glitters:

Today the weather didn’t fool me. The afternoon is perfectly still. The air scorches, as if it were a waft of fire and not just the air we breathe, as if the afternoon refused to die and the hottest hour had begun. There are no clouds, just wispy white streaks unraveled from clouds. And the sky, from down here, looks cool, like the clear water of a dammed stream.

And yet, the story plods from there, following José, a modest sheep herder who gets it in his head that his wife is fooling around on him. (I haven’t gotten that far yet, but the book jacket says that’s what’s going to happen, so it must be true.) The story hops from narrator to narrator, which will probably turn out to be a useful device, but for right now — until I get interested in the story — it just disrupts the momentum and makes it hard to remember where I was and who was talking when I put down Freakonomics and start reading Implacable again.

I have to wonder, in part, what — if anything — the book lost in translation. Makes me wish I could read Portuguese just so I could know for sure if it’s just as hard to get into in its original incarnation. I’m going to keep reading in order to hopefully give a full review before the book is released in August (it’s technically been available since 2000 in Portugal), but it may take me a while.

What do you do when you encounter a book that doesn’t quite grab you the way you’d hoped it would? Jeni just talked about not really feeling Middlesex the first few times she tried to read it. Do you power through, or skim over parts that don’t interest you? Or do you simply put the book down and pick up another?