I Quit One of Literature’s Greatest Novels
Some Questions to Ponder When a Book Just Doesn’t Work for You
To great public shame and personal consternation, I’ve decided to punt The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy back to the TBR for a future me. DNF, know what I mean? Literary bankruptcy. I just couldn’t go on.
There are elements of the book I loved. It’s actually hilarious, but somehow also brain-bleedingly tedious. My gripe emerges from the very structure of the book: Here’s a man’s life story, ostensibly, but the narrative is a long train of comedic digressions, an elaborate exercise in not getting to the point. Whatever my virtues, I’m not that patient.
Do I fault the author? Obviously not. My frustration tolerance isn’t Laurence Sterne’s problem; it’s mine. All he did is write one of English literature’s better acclaimed novels. I’m the one missing out. But then again, am I?
Sunk-Cost Literature
There are only so many hours in a day, twenty-four last I checked. I sleep for about six or seven of those. I work for about seven or eight. I parent. I spend time with my wife. I eat. I exercise. I have plenty of time to read—but not everything. I have to make choices, and I’m pretty sure that’s true for you as well.
I’ve never subscribed to the idea that I’m obligated to finish a book once I start it. It’s a book, not a blood covenant. If a book isn’t doing it for me, I drop it. Sometimes I come back to it. Sometimes I don’t. It all depends on the ROI, business lingo for return on investment. Finishing a book merely because I started it is, to my mind, a great example of the—sorry, more business lingo—sunk-cost fallacy: “I’m already in a hundred pages. Ergo, I have to finish.”
Says who? It’s a lousy use of time. When my children gather around my deathbed, holding my cold, frail hands, and ask what I’m most grateful for, I doubt I’ll mention all the time I squandered reading insufferable books when I’d rather have been chewing rocks.
Of course, there’s the possibility that I would have enjoyed those books had I only stuck it out. Naturally. If “I’m already a hundred pages in” is the push force of the sunk-cost fallacy, this sentiment represents the pull force. Think of how great it could be! Maybe, maybe not. But I’ll never know until I’m done, and by then I’ll have spent the time even if that inducement comes up something other than roses.
It’s a gamble either way, and I bet the odds are better with another book. And since there are countless others, why not?
I sometimes hear people gush about what kind of person we become when we finish tough books. But tough books aren’t exactly what I’m talking about. Doing anything that challenges us might improve our character, including reading difficult books. Nor am I talking about bad books, which aren’t worth reading to begin with.
I’m talking about books which for whatever reason don’t resonate in a particular moment—could be tough, could be easy, could be whatever. They just don’t seem worth going on for. Every reader has some version of that story. Do you keep on and why? Is there some moral force compelling completion? Is it worth (back to ROI) finishing and how do we define worth? And maybe most basic of all . . .
What’s a Book For?
Finishing is a strange concept to begin with if you pause and think about it. Do we ever finish a book? What does that mean? Think Augustine’s Confessions or Montaigne’s Essays, Middlemarch, and The Brothers Karamazov. Do you finish the Bible? Books are tools for thinking and feeling, sometimes praying and other deeper movements of the soul. Do we complete that just because the pages end? Is reaching the end the end? And to pick up the word’s other meaning, is it even the point?
If you read a mystery novel, the conclusion justifies the journey. As such, finishing a mystery is the point of a mystery. It’s like dropping in the final piece of a jigsaw puzzle. But can you say that about a history, a collection of essays or short stories, a treatise on policy, philosophy, or theology? Maybe there are gains in finishing, but maybe the gains are in other sorts of engagement with that book.
As Francis Bacon said,
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.
He said this against the backdrop of a media explosion requiring choice and discernment. We live in an age of plenitude that would have melted Bacon’s mind. Whatever he faced, we need even more discretion when it comes to what we read, how, and for what ends.
Whether you “finish” a book depends entirely on what you’re reading it for. If you got what you came for in two chapters, you finished whether or not you reached the end. And what if you can see you’re not going to get what you came for halfway through? You drop the book and pick up something else. At least, that’s an option; you can do whatever you want.
When an author—or an editor if the book doesn’t have one—plans their book, they see a certain unity, a wholeness. But a reader’s encounter with that book needn’t be total to be meaningful. Who but the reader can measure the ROI? The only reason we doubt this is because we don’t know what readers are for either.
What’s a Reader For?
We get into trouble whenever we forget that art is not wholly a function of artists. There is no art without an audience, even if only a potential audience. There are no books without readers. As Flannery O’Connor said, “It takes readers as well as writers to make literature.” The act of interpretation is what completes a work of art, of literature—which is to say, readers are agents. You have the power to pick up and to put down.
Joan Didion once said,
In many ways, writing is the act of . . . imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. . . . [T]here’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.
Rubbish.
Of course there’s a way of getting around it: It’s silly and untrue. It misconstrues both writing and reading. When we read, we submit to the vision of the author, yes. But that submission isn’t absolute. If I want, I can throw that tome across the room. Reading isn’t a hostage negotiation.
The reader does not serve the author’s intent. We bring our own lives and concerns and interests and purposes to the page, and that informs how we receive it and what we do with it. When I’m reading Didion—something I enjoy—I’m not invaded or dominated. It’s a bizarre image, and one I can’t imagine she really entertained as legitimate. It can’t have described her own reading: There’s helpless Joan, incapable of wrenching free from the malign clutches of Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Capote.
Of course readers are in charge! Could it be any other way? No one forces the book in our hands. What keeps it there? To ask is to answer—and to answer is to be unsurprised that Ben Parker has now joined the chat.
With Great Power . . .
We can also be stupid. I am, all the time. No power should be exercised flippantly. As with my friend Tristram Shandy, it’s not always the book’s fault a reader finds fault. Sometimes it’s the wrong season for a particular book. Sometimes a reader is too immature for it. (Who, me again?)
I tried to read Dostoevsky several times over the years and failed. I re-shelved Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov more times than I can recall. Later, I came back and finished them, both in two weeks’ time. But those earlier aborted attempts? The defect was with me, the all-powerful reader.
I read David Copperfield a few months back. Nothing about the first two thirds did anything but cause my eyeballs to dry. With encouragement from some of you, I soldiered on. To my own surprise and delight, I found I tipped over some invisible ledge and began hurtling toward enjoyment.
Emma Adler nicks a term from the sonnet to describe that moment in her own reading—the volta, or turn. “At this juncture, the speaker of the poem adopts a new perspective on whatever he has been discussing,” she says and repurposes the idea to explain her enjoyment of novels. A book starts off slow but then gets good. “Suddenly,” she says,
I have made it through the part that was creating my investment in the novel—and now it is all payoff. [More ROI—JJM.] Now the novel is not just something whose artistry I can appreciate, but something I first order want to keep reading.
The problem, maybe better to say the risk? There’s nothing inevitable about the volta because it involves an alchemy between the skill of the author and the interest of the reader. Even if you assume the author has all the necessary skill, the reader may not be able to muster the requisite interest for reasons both valid and invalid.
A valid reason is one that gives an author a fair hearing but might still result in an abandoned book, temporarily or even permanently. There’s no eternal edict that says you have to read anything. An invalid reason would be one that damns a book without a hearing. Uncle Ben frowns on such things, and so should we when we spot it in ourselves.
And so I’ve shunted Tristram Shandy back to the TBR—for now. I’m sure I’ll come back to it. I know there’s something special in all those tangled digressions. I’m just not up for finding it today.
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I felt this way about The Master and The Margerita (spelling? See? I did not finish) just never warmed up to it :/
Anyone who feels obligated to finish a book is a lunatic.