One of my “I didn’t finish the book” reviews, Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep. Like a lot of these university/school novels, the dirt poor protagonist has won a scholarship to an elite institution where all the other pupils can trace their family back to the Mayflower. I wouldn’t say it’s a bad book by any means, I just found myself unable to engage with it so gave up about 10% of the way in. It felt inauthentic and a bit too creative-writery to me, a common failing of most modern novels; for example Donna Tartt’s The Secret History also felt like something of a creative writing exercise, albeit one that had burst through the constraints & niceties of its apparent origin. Prep just felt lame, formulaic, everything you would expect from a modern, successful novel: carefully attuned to the needs & phobias of New York publishing, and unilluminated by even a flicker of real passion or creativity or intelligence – at least in the first 10%, which was as far as I got before I decided I’d be more intellectually nourished by Baldur’s Gate 2.