River Bend Chronicle by Ben Miller

The entire title is: River Bend Chronicle: The Junkification of a Boyhood Idyll amid the Curious Glory of Urban Iowa.  Set in the town I’ve called home for thirty-seven years, I was looking forward to this book. I should have looked elsewhere. It is a laborious tome of many pages going nowhere.  The author has a fantastic vocabulary and was wont to use it all on every page of unneeded, plodding, rhetoric.  Reread the title as it is indicative of the rest of writing.  Lots of words, skipping around with multiple possibilities, none of which are saying anything.  After fifty-five pages I got the faint gist of where it was going and did not want to plow through hundreds of pages to get there.  It did mention places and times I remember, but they seemed to be thrown out as markers of the authenticity of his angst. Yes, Mom was a problem. Yes, his family was dysfunctional. He did no more for it as a story than in real life. Funny how when I read a book, I start thinking and talking like the text, which in this case, I detested. I skipped to the last twenty or so pages, realized it got where I knew it was going, and was glad I had not taken the entire journey. I was done with it. 1 out of 10.  Maybe.