Book: The Gift

I hated The Gift (Amazon). I hated it for seven whole chapters (at 15-20 minutes each, iirc) until I finally liberated myself from it at 48% complete. That’s still hours of my life gone to it though, and I regret them. Usually I don’t let myself write up books I didn’t finish, but I think the world needs more stories about books we didn’t finish and why so that we can save others from trying to read them.

Important to put here: I’m such a completionist. I can count the number of books I haven’t finished on one hand. There are plenty of books that I think were longer than they needed to be, ranging between “I actually appreciated the time and depth on that topic” and “meh a blog post would have been sufficient”. The information to content in this book was exceptionally low.

Basically there’s one idea in it; that gifts need to keep being in circulation. I actually really like that idea (I wrote a bit about that here) but it’s an idea for a blogpost, not a book of this length. It’s basically some dude pontificating about social anthropology – various stories, whether fairy tales, or tribes, about gifts moving in circulation. There was some about women being given as gifts in marriage and LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I ENJOYED THAT (I did not enjoy that. At all).

All in all my conclusion is: do not buy this book, do not start this book, do not pass go.