I kind of feel...guilty.

You know those things you're supposed to like? Or respect? Or find interesting, or whatever? Because they deal with Very Important things? And then you feel guilty if you don't, I dunno, appreciate them? Like, for example, say you read The Diary of Anne Frank and you don't think it was all that amazing. Or you see the original canvas of Van Gogh's Starry Night in a museum, and you are unmoved. You don't necessarily not like these things, you just...aren't that impressed.

That's how I feel about Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. I really feel like I should be incredibly moved by it. After all, it's about a horrific event (the civil war in Sierra Leone), and its author was a boy soldier who witnessed and participated in terrifying activities, and the author is the same age as me, so you'd think I'd compare my life to his and be a little bit awed and a little bit scared and a whole lot grateful.

And I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little bit of all of those things. There were times in this book that I stopped and thought, "I could never do that," followed by, "...could I?" Followed by, "I hope I never have to find out." So yeah, there's definitely some visceral response going on there. But, I dunno. The book's just not that great.

I feel really guilty saying that. I feel like I should be praising this book from the rooftops just because of the topic. I feel like I'm somehow less of a human being because I wasn't deeply moved by Beah's experiences. I wanted to like this book a lot. I really did. I just...didn't. Mostly it's because of the writing itself. My dad is fond of saying, "His English is much better than my [enter language of choice here]," when hearing people speak for whom English is a second language. And certainly, Beah's English is quite good. But it's just so...accurate. It doesn't sparkle. It has no life. To use a tried and true English Nerd phrase, it doesn't show, it tells. It's extremely dull to read because there's no interesting language use. Sometimes you might as well be reading a textbook.

I'm not completely un-recommending this book (is that a word? It is now), because the events it describes are certainly worth learning about, and the opportunity to do so from someone who lived through them is, for lack of a better word, important. But I can't wholeheartedly recommend it because, frankly, it's just not well-written.

Okay, I feel guilty. I'm going to go crawl under a rock now.