I rarely, rarely, start a book and don’t finish it. Sometimes I put it aside for a while, either because another book requires I read it, or because the book is not to my liking and I have to be in just the right mood to finish it. But I have just laid aside a book, unfinished, and placed it in the sale/donation pile. I won’t pick it up again.

A while ago I went looking for a book I was pretty sure was in a certain spot on our downstairs bookshelves, about the biblical book of Genesis, one I’ve been planning on reading but had kept putting off. But when I looked, I couldn’t find it. Another book was more or less in the place I thought that book was: The Genesis Flood. Fine, I thought. I’ll read that one since I found it and worry about the other one later.

Big mistake. TGF turned out to be a difficult book to read. It is filled with scientific names. It is also, to a great extent, composed of quotes from many sources rather than the authors’ own words. I have read books like that before, and large blocks of quotes tend to make the book difficult. Maybe boring.

I think the authors were building up to the creation of the world as having taken six literal days, rather than six periods of time. I think. They were holding their conclusions close to the chest. They began the book by looking at the different theories of historical geology, and how geologists have interpreted data throughout the ages, and why these different interpretations were insufficient to explain the data. I found this section not as well written as I would have liked, and was glad it was over.

But the next section, where they started to explain how the biblical flood explained the inconsistencies in the geological data wasn’t any better. I concluded these authors weren’t writing for me, or to be a popular book, but rather a scholarly book for geologists. I’ve read a couple of such books before. I finished them, but found them most difficult to get through.

Will I ever find the book I was looking for? Maybe I’m confusing The Genesis Flood for the book I was looking for. Or maybe it’s in a box somewhere. Ah, well, I have plenty of other books to read, so no need to spend a lot of time searching right now.