More giving up

Over the last couple of months I've been reading THE HISTORIAN on and off. The premise is interesting, that Vlad Dracula is still around ["alive" seems to be the wrong word] and his existence is kept a secret. The problem is that it's taken nearly 200 pages for the "story" to truly start, and there is a switching back and forth between first person narrators [I think] to where I can't really tell who is telling the story at any given time and when. I'm sure if I went back I could figure it out, but it would be easier if at the very least the author could have had each chapter saying whose point of view it was and when. This by itself I could muddle through, but
the slowness of the proceedings causes me to put THE HISTORIAN on the back burner, maybe I'll wait till I hit a dry period for books then pick it up again.

I occasionally do have books where I read them when I get the time, and am able to drop them for long periods and then return to them and still enjoy them. OLDEST LIVING CONFEDERATE WIDOW TELLS ALL has been that way, it's been my companion for nearly four months now. I've read it while waiting on my wife during our various trips together, never reading it at home or any other time. I am now in its final 60-70 pages, and of course need to finish it at home at this point since there is too little left for me to fill up the two to three hours I usually have when waiting.
I enjoy the book and its narrator. Allan Gurganus really had something going, I can imagine the character's voice just taking over. Surprising how young he was when he wrote the novel, he was only in his early 40s when it was released [so he was probably around my age when he was writing it.] I'm reaching the age now where I'm older than a lot of the writers I'm reading. Still not most of them, but a lot of them. I need to really make something happen with my writing. Not in a "time is ticking away" sense, but just because I think it's the only thing I can really do well.