Part of the reason I'm reading less fiction lately is that I keep picking up (meaning, buying) highly-praised fiction and finding it overhyped, in other words, disappointing. Joshua Ferris's Then We Came To The End is an example; it was transparent and I was extremely put off by the cancer thing, having seen it coming; in fact I can't imagine who did not see it coming, including the characters in the book. Jedediah Berry's almost-wonderful Manual of Detection was aggravating; he didn't go far enough into his own story, and the same is true of China Mieville's much-praised The City and the City, whose ending I found (a) boringly predictable and (b) kind of a cop-out. (That said, I went through a lot of Jhumpa Lahiri this year. Very satisfying, genuine emotion.)

But when I read a book about drift currents, polar bears, or whatever, at least I can be reasonably sure that I'm going to get something interesting about the subject to take away and think about later, instead of acquiring a mental scab to pick at.