The radical act of finishing a book

Sometimes, you just gotta do it

A recurring scene: me, telling Life Associate that it is okay for him not to finish the book he is not enjoying.

A somewhat recurring scene: me, tumbling through a book I am not enjoying but unable to drop it.

If my previous dispatch was a short one to celebrate a whole month and the things I loved, how about we pivot into talking about not liking things? But not being able to let go?

I am, of course, just talking about books.

Despite my frequent reminders to others around me that you can, indeed, drop a book you don’t like, I never not finish a book. I have some pending readings that have been going on for a while. I dip in and out of them every once in a blue moon, an exercise facilitated by the fragmentary nature of those texts (a collection of poems, of short stories, of letters), but I do not feel any hurry over finishing them within a given period. They are there for when I want them, or need them, and picking them up, I would say, is never intending to get to a finishing line. They work more as little bite-sized experiences of different writings that I can sample around other activities and come back to when the mood strikes.

In the past three years, there has been one book that I picked up, read for about an hour, then wholeheartedly put back on the shelf: Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.¹ If you’ve read my last post or follow any of my other social media profiles, you’ll remember that I do very much love Woolf’s writing, so the tidbit above may come as a bit of a surprise. I will excuse my past self by saying that it was my first try at Woolf, when I was still rediscovering my way into literature, and it came so highly recommended that I knew, the moment I started it, that it was going to be one of those books that require a Big Thinking Hat, which I did not have it in me to put on at the time. I went back to it a few months later, after reading Orlando (a much easier way into Woolf’s writing, in my opinion), and did not regret my previous putting it aside nor my coming back to it. Some books are like that, I believe: they need to come to you at the right time, or else be wasted on you. To the Lighthouse was just such a book.

A limited view of our Woolf collection, feat. my latest read of hers.

Having just one did-not-finish book during this period does not mean I am amazing at my literary choices and only pick up titles that I at the very least like. On the contrary, I have sat through several others I have absolutely not enjoyed (or, in one case, objectively hated so much I sold it back) because I really could not let it go. You could see it as the obverse of my fear of literary commitment to long books, or at least its complement. If not a direct causation, there’s definitely a correlation between those two mental habits: perhaps I dread the idea of reading long tomes because…what if I don’t like it? and then I’m stuck with it for several hundred pages? Better to stay clear, just in case.

Sticking to a book I don’t like is not masochism. I see it more like a brain exercise. As someone terribly impatient, sticking to something that does not, in fact, spark joy, can be a way for me to practice some type of stillness, to remember the importance of delayed gratification. But also, as a serial non-finisher of projects and hobbies, it is rewarding in and of itself to be able to actually check something as started and finished.

Sometimes, I am fully tricked by the fourth-cover blur and jump into a title only to find out I have been lied (or at least fibbed) to. Probably something as close to a universal experience of being a reader as you can get, even if it varies from reader to reader and from book to book, the moment you realize it will not be what you expected can be devastating. Or aggravating. Or just come as a thud. Either way, it will probably leave a bitter taste in your mouth, sometimes aggravated by the cup of coffee you forgot about and has gone tepid. I’ve collected some of these moments, but I try not to advertise them. You can see it as some type of fear of confrontation or of coming across as petty, silly, hard to please. Not that I am fully innocent of such accusations at all times, but you never know if a book doesn’t click for you but touches someone deeply. At least one book I’ve read this year would fall into this category: the premise seemed so interesting but I could not care one bit for its execution, neither in terms of plot and characters nor in terms of prose. Then I saw someone on Instagram praising the book for how it resonated with them and how much they liked seeing some of those elements of their life reflected in literature. Sometimes, a book just isn’t for me. But these cases are easy to digest and understand: literature book ends up not appealing to my taste, next, please.

But sometimes, I will go into a book more out of intellectual curiosity than because of an emotional desire to experience that world. It doesn’t happen often (I don’t consider myself a consummate reader of “classics”), but every once in a while I come across a title that sparks an “oh, I remember reading about it” and that will be enough of a brain tickle to push me into it. Do people care that I didn’t care for Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World? Unlikely. Did I care? Not really. I was curious about this seventeenth-century title, touted by its description by Penguin as “highly original part Utopian fiction, part feminist text,” is considered a forerunner of science fiction, and that was the long and short of it. I approached it as a type of literary box I wanted to check. Not because anyone told me to, but because it seemed to fit into several different categories of interests I had at the time (and still do). It wasn’t an academic reading, and maybe I would have engaged with the text more if it had been, but the point was not to study it. The point was to read it. And you could say I feel more well-rounded as a reader after experiencing it, maybe, but I would be lying if I said I enjoyed said experience. To be quite honest, I hardly remember most of it, other than just not being into it. Not the best place to start a review, but definitely a sentiment that has stuck with me.

Recently, I picked up Margaret Oliphant’s A Beleaguered City and Other Stories, a little volume I bought second-hand back in 2022, thinking it could be a good title to add to my “spooky October” list of that year. I mean, a story about a city whose inhabitants are kicked out by ghosts? Count me in. Yet October came and went (and then another one), and Oliphant’s book remained untouched on my bookshelf. Well, it moved around with all the shuffling and changes that have happened to our bookshelves since then, but it remained unread. So last month, in an effort to be more mindful of titles sitting for months waiting to be picked up, I finally did.

And it was, for lack of a better word, a slog.

I really wanted to like it. Or at least enjoy it, even if just from an intellectual point of view. Some books are like that, they may not make it to any list of personal favorites but they will have a little something that you truly appreciate: a scene, a turn of phrase, the general care towards the prose. But as the last days of May rolled in and out, I had to admit to myself that Beleaguered City would not be a fun read. It was, at best, a curio that I can now pull up around October and Halloween, are you interested in ghosts and Scottish Free Church sensibilities? Then I’ve got a book for you!

Liking a book can be a straightforward affair: I liked the way the theme was developed, I liked the way the characters were portrayed, I liked the prose and its poetics, I had fun. Actively disliking something, or even more subtly, not liking something, sometimes requires extra thinking: was it the sentence structure? was the prose too clunky? were the themes poorly explored? were the characters just too unlikeable? or too likable?

Or, worse of all problems: did I just not get it?

That always remains a possibility. But in both cases above, I think I just didn’t meet these authors at the right middle-ground; perhaps there was no proper middle-ground between my expectations and interests and their interests and projects. This type of incompatibility can be at the core of any dislike, but classic books hold a special place in this type of non-enjoyment because more often than not they come to our hands with big cultural baggage, the sort that is hard to put aside when you crack it open. Publishers such as Penguin, Oxford, NYRB know it well enough, and their prefaces often refer to this storied history of said stories as a way to prepare the reader for what’s to come. “And this is important because…” But at the end of the day being important, being famous, being recognized as a cornerstone of a genre, none of that makes a book poke you in the right places of your brain and of your heart. You can come to appreciate its place in history, its literary achievements, its cultural import, but not like it.

And that is, of course, just fine.

Being a reader—or being a consumer of any type of media, I would say—involves liking as much as disliking, and knowing that the line between these two spheres is porous, fluid, and can move without you even noticing it. It is, in fact, what makes exploring literature so much fun, at the end of the day: it’s a constant hit-or-miss, in some ways more unpredictable than we consider it to be. Cast the first stone if you have never picked up a book and then whispered quietly or groaned loudly that I cannot believe I didn’t like it or, even more fun, I did not expect to love this.

So I keep the two Margarets, Cavendish and Oliphant, on my shelves. Because one day I might want to revisit them, and in doing so find new and old things to like and dislike.

Or maybe I’ll realize I just don’t get it, and that will be just as fine.

1. A quick reminder that I do not make any money from the Bookshop.org links, but they help support my local indie bookstore!