A Review: Giving up on a Book After About 100 Pages
You don’t always need to know how it ends.
I used to feel an unrelenting obligation to do things and see them through completion. Cutting bait wasn’t a phrase or notion I was familiar with. Quitting was dishonorable — would come back in a detrimental way to bite you in the ass. Sure wouldn’t ouldn’t build the kind of character your elders were hoping for.
That’s how, among many other things caused by this belief, I ended up reading every word of Jane Eyre the summer prior to my high school senior year.
Charlotte Bronte’s book was assigned reading about which I had to write a paper and conduct a presentation if I wanted to complete a rather rigorous class and pass a test that would grant me college general education credits before I began to even seriously consider whereabouts I might be matriculating come the next fall. (That’d end up being Penn State. An interesting decision, given that I got into Oberlin, potentially because they didn’t really care much about your math SAT scores. Fun times were had, though and I don’t regret it. You can’t know whether one road over the other would lead to better or worse, given that you can really only travel the one.)
I’d say opting to take AP English was because of that obligation thing I once possessed, but that was more the result of an accord I struck with my parents that would allow me to take a rudimentary math course where you would learn about how to balance a checkbook instead of making a complete fool of myself attempting to grapple with a Calculus curriculum. A tough bargain, but when the carrot of also permitting a second study hall added to my schedule was dangled in front of my face I solemnly shook hands with my mom, putting on an act to sell it, as I was making out like a bandit with this agreement. In study hall I could read whatever I wanted the entire time, and I had like a 50% chance of getting a teacher who didn’t care if you dipped Kodiak while doing so. Some would even let you leave the classroom and go hang out in the basketball locker room, but I didn’t often do that because I didn’t know if my friend would be banging his girlfriend down there, which he said they often did and I didn’t necessarily believe but didn’t really want to witness either.
Did I find Jane Eyre enjoyable?
Not even one iota. Hated pretty much every second I spent reading it, even if I was poolside. Knew pretty early on it wasn’t gonna be my thing. (This was not surprising, given that my favorite writers were Chuck Klosterman, Sloane Crosley, David Sedaris, Hunter S. Thompson, Michael Connelly and Nicholas Sparks. Yes, one of those is an outlier. I dig what I dig.)
I’m more of an Emily Bronte guy.
Am I glad, though, that I completed Jane Eyre as it is canon and considered an enduring classic that is to this day (I assume) taught in classes all over the country and world?
I suppose when I finished it I felt a fleeting sense of accomplishment, but I experience that occasionally nipple-hardening sensation whenever I finish any book, and after more than three decades of diligent reading that’s kinda lost its spark (This has led me to a lot of experimental nipple-play because I’m just constantly chasing that dragon.) Even in hindsight I don’t believe I was really any the better for it. No knock on Charlotte Bronte. I respect what she did, accomplishing many things other writers only ever dream about.
That said, I don’t know the people who get to decide what is canon, but we have comically differing opinions. (This could be written off as a lack of depth, sophistication, taste, etc., but I’m a big believer in liking what you like and finding what entertains you, enriches you or, if you hit the sweet spot, both simultaneously. And not being apologetic about it. Unless what rings your cherries is felonious or morally reprehensible. I’m not gonna be like, “Yeah, well, Dexter did have some flaws for sure but talk about turning a hobby into a side hustle, and he really looked like he was getting a lot of enjoyment out of it. If you love what you do…” Everything within reason.)
But once I cracked it it was like I had bought a ticket and I was taking the ride even if it wouldn’t transport me anywhere I really wanted to go.
I kept doing that for the whole school year, and while I did get to indulge in some bangers, it was more miss than hit. The variables for why are vast, for sure. I chalk it up mostly to the notion that anything we were reading had made the list for a reason (like, there has to be something to that poem about the red wheel barrow, I would assume, though I’ve read plenty of analysis and it all seems like a pretty strong stretch to me). They all had merit. But didn’t vibe with my temperament or where and who I was at the time. They didn’t satiate me so I sought out authors and books that fit more with my interests, and who had been recommended to me by people I trusted. (Willa Cather, John Steinbeck, Sylvia Plath, Joseph Heller, Mary Shelley, Raymond Fucking Carver, deep cuts from my boy F. Scott. And that’s only mentioning people who are taught in many high school and collegiate classes. ) This took up a lot of my bandwidth, conflicting with the mandated reading and subsequent amateur analysis that came on top of my other interests (girls, basketball, Magic: The Gathering, binge-drinking), all of which I took to with almost worrisome dedication, and my performance suffered because of it. But I made my peace with that. Understood, or at least believed, that
The best paper I wrote through those two semesters of what felt like torture but was allegedly supposed to enrich my still-developing brain, by far, was on Catch-22. It hadn’t been assigned, but was on a list we could cherry-pick from, graciously given to us by our teacher around Christmastime, with a paper due soon as we got back to the classroom. I had half a mind to go off list and full rogue, turn in some junk about the novel upon which the greatest Christmas film of all time, Die Hard, is based. But I still didn’t know where I was going to go to school the next year and in addition to wanting to lock up those credits no matter where they may be used, I had to keep the GPA bolstered so that it wouldn’t raise a red flag to the places I hoped were considering charging me a hefty sum to really lean into a burgeoning drinking problem and at one point gain weight as if I were in a competition to do so. So, cooler heads prevailed and I kept finishing the books and the papers, even if I was mailing it in and didn’t feel great about that.
This continued into college, where I did all the required reading and put in the bare minimum effort on papers and exams to comfortably make it employ-ably out of that joint.
I found much more personal growth, fulfillment and, perhaps most importantly, enjoyment out of the voracious side-reading I continued to do, coupled with the summer and moonlighting internships and freelancing I took on, with some of the personal writing I fell in love with peppered in. (Had a blog named The Calm During the Storm — which is, in hindsight, laughable, as I have not been known to be calm in inclement weather or otherwise — where I would write captivating content about topics like mixing ranch dressing with ketchup and dipping your chicken tenders in it, or a monthly roundup of the random thoughts I had that I’d jotted down in a Moleskine notebook I kept in my pocket like the cliché I was.)
It wasn’t until I moved to New York City and was reading more voraciously than ever before (mostly because of arduous subway commutes to and from work, but also because I was taking the writing thing extremely seriously and reading obviously comes with wanting to improve as a writer, I believe several reputable sources would attest to this) that I started to think about stopping slogging through a book after giving it what I felt was a fair shot in favor of moving on to the next up on my wildly eclectic Goodreads list.
One evening on my way home, I read the final sentence of a pretty widely acclaimed novel and asked myself why I had stuck it out.
“To eventually say you finished it,” I thought as I gazed at my shoes while listening to shoegaze while strolling to my apartment from the train.
“That doesn’t seem like the best reason.”
“Why not?”
“Like, who am I saying that to? Who realistically cares that I finished a book a lot of people like and that I don’t have a positive opinion about it?”
“How many times have you, while on a first date, randomly found a way to bring up that you have read Infinite Jest in its entirety, including the footnotes?”
“Okay. Tough but fair.”
“And did you not do this most recently less than a week ago?”
“Jesus, man. Uncle.”
“Just saying.”
“Well, if you recall, those women didn’t really seem to care. So it kind of proves my point.”
“You ever gonna stop with the self-indulgent self-deprecation?”
“At this point I’m not entirely sure how to shut it off.”
“Tamp it down a little, at least. It’s getting pretty tired. I say that with love.”
“I’ll do what I can.”
The intrusive thoughts on this topic continued because once i get going I keep going, and I eventually concluded that maybe it wasn’t worth spending my time trying to slog through something I’d started but wasn’t making my nethers tingle. (I have some strange reactions to reading books I like, apparently.) Maybe getting going didn’t necessarily mean I always had to keep going. I put it to the test a few books down the line when I got 100 pages through a novel that wasn’t, like, terrible, but not compelling enough to make me yearn to read it through the night in lieu of watching Murder, She Wrote. (I set a pretty high and refined critical bar,)
So I set it down and moved on with my life. Didn’t go onto Goodreads and give it a negative review where I complained about how I couldn’t even get through it. Because I’m never going to really, at least vigorously, knock anyone who puts in the work it takes to write a book of any length or quality unless it’s egregiously nefarious in some way. I’m far from qualified to define what is objectively good or bad, and it’s one of the few things I refuse to pretend to be. Criticism is important but that doesn’t mean I have to be a critic. It’s not like there’s a shortage.
I have a friend who really hates on the Fifty Shades series, and for what I feel are justifiable reasons, but I can’t join into that vitriol with too much gusto. Because I can’t help thinking about how that phenomenon of words printed and bound was clearly for someone. A lot of someones. So it’s tough to say it’s inherently bad. If it was, E.L. James wouldn’t have been the world’s highest-earning author the year it came out, snagging, according to Google, around $100 million — a stat that’s tough to achieve unless you sell oil or are really good at swinging a wooden bat or are Rumpelstiltskin (if you factor in inflation). Her success is far from definable by something shallow as earnings, though. Her impact has been astronomical. Name anyone who has made more people, worldwide, extremely horny by way of the written word. Who even comes close? Nabokov? Maybe, but if so, that’s illustrative of a pretty big problem if you think about it.
I suppose the alternative tack would be that something can be very bad and yet very successful, and that an unfathomable amount of people have very poor judgment to the point that it’d be laughable if it wasn’t so concerning and even downright frightening. A notion that is currently hitting home for many of us, but that’s a whole other thing and I’m just myopically going to focus on written entertainment because contemplating that enduring reality within the world at large is gong to send me to the fetal position with a quickness.
Anyway. I just went ahead and got way into the next book.
For a while I kept feeling a little cajoled by an intangible entity to come back to it and reach the end. But eventually I got past that, and the only thing I felt was free. I’d equate it to taking my bra off after a long day if I could empathize with that, which I can’t. Nope. Definitely not.
Since then I’ve been ghosting on books every now and then. And I’m better for it. Sometimes you don’t need to make it all the way to the end of something. And the best way to win can occasionally be to quit. You don’t have to be a captive audience if you don’t want to.
It helps me hone in more closely on making choices I’m likely to like or appreciate given the entirety of my current atmosphere and temperament. I’m casting a calculated net, and because of that I quit on books less. It’s also a way for me to explore more authors and the breadth of their work. Also, if I recall something I stopped and started and feel some lure to go back to it, I always can.
Like, I will say that I recently went back to that book I closed on an F Train to Brooklyn years ago — now finding myself in a different phase of life while still trying to generally find myself — that made me curious to see if it might fit with what I was currently enjoying. I finished it. It was great.
So, fuck me if I think I know anything.
Giving up on a book after about 100 pages: 3 STARS