On Unfinished Books

When is it alright to give up on a book?

Not never; clearly reading time is a limited and precious resource and should not be wasted on un-rewarding books when there are so many others out there waiting to be enjoyed.

Neither, though, immediately the reading gets a little difficult, drops in pace, or starts to get a bit silly.

Somewhere between these two we each have to draw our own line in the sand. For me it is unusual to abandon a book part way through, I think for the following reasons:

1.    I choose books quite carefully – to get onto the ever growing ‘to read’ pile it has to pass more than a cursory glance; and then to get picked from that pile for reading it will face stiff competition. To abandon it would then call my initial judgement into question, making me naturally reluctant.

2.    Having invested a few hours to get well into the book it seems a bit of a waste to give it up – but this has to be weighed up against the potential greater waste of time in continuing.

3.    It may always get better or produce a late revelation that makes sense of it all or justifies the early indifference.

4.    As I tend to have 3 or 4 books on the go at once I can press on with one dubious volume while getting light relief from the others, so avoiding feeling deprived by the offending tome.

So few of my reads have been discarded, shelved or disposed of unfinished – just half a dozen come to mind – but they do include some well-regarded books that just did not do it for me, including:

§  20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne – due to interminably turgid descriptions of underwater inactivity this sank without trace in the Sea of Nonentity.

§  The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers – I anticipated a thrilling period spy story and found instead a manual of yachting terms, techniques and torpidity that became becalmed somewhere off the Coast of Nowhere.

§  Moby Dick by Herman Melville – I am embarrassed by this one and have vowed to return, older wiser and with more time, to search for the mythical great white whale of universal truth that lies reputedly somewhere within its pages.

The nautical theme of these three may seem significant but I happily sailed through The Kon-Tiki Expedition, The Life of Pi, and A World of My Own (Robin Knox-Johnston’s account of his single handed circumnavigation) without getting sea-sick of them.

§  Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak – I have tried twice to read this but have twice hit the buffers like a train in a Siberian snowdrift; I blame the translation.

§  Lake Wobegon Days by Garrison Keillor – I found the author’s laconic radio broadcasts amusing but the book was too slow paced and more woeful than beguiling.

And now I need to transfer Honore de Balzac’s ‘Cousin Betty’ from ‘currently reading’ into the retired unfinished select few. I quite enjoyed his ‘Pere Goriot’ many years ago but I’m finding this volume of his ‘Comedie Humaine’ a bit of a chore. The satire is aimed at French politics and society of a period of which I am clearly ignorant, and the prose is very clunky – possibly a questionable translation in this free down-loaded ‘public access’ edition.

So my advice on unfinished books is: choose your reads with care, but don’t be afraid to experiment; persevere at least 50 to 100 pages to acclimatise yourself the style and pace; before baling out give it a week off and then read another chapter; if you then decide it’s not for you take it to the charity shop – it may be for somebody else - and move on with no regrets.