The Question of Whether to Keep Reading

I used to finish every book I started. I'm not quite sure why. It was like brushing my teeth or wearing earrings or going through my stretching routine before running: something I just did because I did it, without even thinking about it.

At a certain point, though, perhaps when I had kids and a job and less time to read, I realized that this habit, really this compulsion, was keeping me from reading. If I didn't like my book, I wouldn't read at all. I couldn't start a new book, because I had to finish my book. But I didn't like my book, so I wouldn't read it, which meant I didn't finish it and thus couldn't start a new one. Something of a readerly Catch-22.

So I threw caution and habit to the wind and started abandoning books. If I didn't like it, I wouldn't read it. I'd return it to the library, or put it back on the shelf, or even just leave it in the stack on the bedside table, and I'd defiantly find a new book. Sometimes I stopped after a few pages, sometimes half way through.

I started a list of books I'd abandoned, right next to the list of books I've read. Somehow that helped it seem ok.

Sometimes, though, it's hard. There are the books I love immediately and race right through (Prep). There are the books that grow on me, engaging me just enough from the beginning to keep me reading, if slowly or even a bit resentfully, and eventually becoming a pleasure (On Beauty). There are the books I cheerfully abandon after a chapter or so (something I took out of the library last week which so totally didn't work for me that I've already forgotten the title). But then there are the books that I don't quite like enough to want to keep reading, but don't quite dislike enough to quit without a second thought.

I have two of those out of the library right now. New novels I'd heard of by famousish literaryish writers: Kathryn Harrison (you know, the affair with dad book [Amazon link for reviews], which I've never read, and a bunch of novels that always get reviewed in the Times, which I've never read either) and Lynne Sharon Schwartz (loads of middle-class New York intellectual novels, including Disturbances in the Field which is great). Promising, no?

No. They're not working for me. The first chapter of Envy is dazzling, and I was ready to settle in, but then the plot gets tedious (psychoanalyst with dead kid obsessed with sex) and the writing gets pedestrian (the dialogue, my god, the dialogue is so bad). The Writing on the Wall is way too self-conscious in its "I'm writing a 9/11 novel"-ness. The character has oddnesses that make her seem like a character, not a person, and there is an arch tone, maybe it's the self-consciousness, a kind of winking at the reader, like aren't we smart to be reading about this odd character and knowing the towers are about to fall and, presumably, change everything (I haven't gotten there yet, I'm only in the middle of Chapter 2).

Oviously I should just stop reading. But I can't seem to let go. Maybe it's the old completion compulsion; maybe it's kind of wanting to see what happens; maybe it's wondering if they are really so bad, given how good the reviews are (I read The Starter Wife straight through in two days, curious if it could possibly be as bad as it was, and it was indeed as bad as it was, but it was trash, absurdly trash, fully aware of its trashness, so that was fine). And I don't really have anything else to read--except the stack of books-to-be-read on my dresser, now so high it has mitosised into two stacks.

Maybe I'm just having trouble letting go and moving on.