Not Finishing Books

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

You know what it feels like to fall in love with a book.

Maybe you open to a random page and you trip over a beautiful passage.

And before you know it, you’re head over heels.

That’s the falling in love part.

But how do you know when it’s time to break up with a book?

I mean, I look at my own bookshelves and I see lots and lots of failed relationships.

Books whose spines are wrinkled but only up to a certain point.

You know, the point where I moved on.

It wasn’t them.

It was me.

It used to be that if I started a book, I felt obliged to finish it and I’d soldier on through all the pages.

You know, I don’t know why.

Just sort of thinking that that’s what you’re supposed to do.

You know, maybe there was some cosmic reason that the book and I ended up together.

And maybe there’s something to be said for making yourself read all the way to the end.

But, you know, more and more, I feel like I’m not obligated at all to do that.

And in fact, I feel even better reading what Samuel Johnson had to say about this.

He said that the notion that you have to finish every book is surely strange.

You may as well resolve that whatever men you happen to get acquainted with, you are to keep them for life.

A book may be good for nothing, or there may be only one thing in it worth knowing.

Are we to read it all through?

It’s a good question, right?

It’s a great question.

And in your heart, you know that somebody poured their heart into making this book and all the publishing people involved and the bookseller and even the Amazon guy who delivered it, right?

Yeah, yeah.

And maybe they know something I don’t know that I need to know and I should read this book.

I mean, do you have it?

And friends recommend books.

Oh, yeah.

They fix you up.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It’s like a date.

Exactly.

And there’ll be a chorus of people at a dinner party going, oh, I loved the book.

And you’re like, I’m on page 50.

I’m not convinced.

Oh.

I can’t finish it.

I can’t finish it.

And then you have to have that uncomfortable conversation later.

How did you like the book?

And I’m like, well, I have new opinions about your taste.

But did you ever feel that you had to finish a book?

I did when I was younger.

And then as I got older and the books mounted up and I started to realize I would never finish all the books that I wanted to read ever.

I mean, I’ll have to live to be three or four hundred years old before I finish just the books that I have now.

Exactly.

So now you get 100 pages max.

Yeah, yeah.

100.

I give you 100 pages.

If you can’t convince me that you’re worth reading in 100 pages, I think you failed, not me.

That’s good. I like that.

So tell us about your love life with books.

When do you decide whether to break up with that book?

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send it an email to words@waywordradio.org.