Toronto’s Women’s Post February 2004 Vol. 6 No. 2
Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity features my favourite self-ridicule: "I lost the plot for a while then," says protagonist Rob Fleming, post-breakup. "And I lost the subplot, the script, the soundtrack, the intermission, my popcorn, the credits and the exit sign."
Losing the plot is, in its more literal sense, one of the many reasons why I’d put down a book. Like most readers, I’ve picked up an equal number of mediocre books and page-turners. While the reasoning behind finishing a book is dead simple (you want to find out what happens), the decision to stop reading a book is more complex (it often involves guilt).
I once had a roommate who would cut a piece of cake and then proceed to eat so slowly he’d invariably get distracted and lose interest halfway through. He was very thin as a result, and our living room was constantly littered with half-eaten portions of food in various states of decay. Unsurprisingly, he was also a slow reader and no matter how enthusiastically he praised a new book, if you asked him about it a couple months later his response was always the same: "I got part way through and didn’t finish it and now it’s been so long since I read the first part, I’d have to re-read it, so I’ve decided not to bother."
Losing literary momentum and interest in a book, no matter how initially scintillating its ideas, are common reasons to put a book back on the shelf. Another one is lack of time - you start reading something, get interrupted and never return. If your dream is to finish a library book, you can only keep it on life support for so long - renew it once, twice, three times and you’re fine, but after that you’ll have to return it for good. At least they’re out of the house, because the books you buy and never finish will collect dust and haunt you for years to come.
I admit I’ve been defeated by several hefty classics I wanted to read because I thought I should read them. I still feel guilty for borrowing my dad’s lovely hardcover edition of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and only ever reaching the third chapter. I’ve started (and stopped) reading Malcolm Lowry’s purportedly brilliant Under the Volcano not once, but twice. I enjoy classics by Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Smart and Sylvia Plath, and will eventually explore the world of dead white male with more enthusiasm, but right now I prefer culturally relevant novels and short stories by contemporary writers such as Mark Haddon and Lorrie Moore.
I think the most common reason people stop reading a book is because they don’t like it. Yet it must have been sufficiently intriguing for them to pick it up in the first place.
Sadly, sometimes the real culprit is bad writing, instead of lack of time or neglect. Writer and reviewer W.P. Kinsella is so annoyed at publishers’ failure to protect the public from poorly written books, he issues annual awards for books that "should have stayed in the bottom drawer with the empty bottles, orange peels and condom wrappers."
We’ve all had literary wrestles with plodding stories, unlikable characters, confusing language, untenable plot shifts and piled on clichés. Steven King actually defends such work for its helpfulness to writers: "One learns most clearly what not to do by reading bad prose," he notes in On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. "One novel like Asteroid Miners (or Valley of the Dolls, Flowers in the Attic, and The Bridges of Madison County, to name just a few) is worth a semester at a good writing school, even with the superstar guest lecturers thrown in."
Not to encourage further hasty novels, as there are plenty enough to learn from already. I’d rather read a single exceptional book than five mediocre ones. So unless you’re reading for scholarly or professional reasons, when a book is a disappointment there’s really no shame in putting it down. After all, you’re the only person who has to know you didn’t finish.
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