If you’ve spent any amount of time reviewing books, or if you’ve spent any amount of time in academic study, or – as in my case – both, you get into the habit of feeling that once you start a book you have to finish it. It’s, like, a rule, or something.
Except, of course it isn’t. It’s just a bad habit.
It’s a habit I am trying to break. Ok, it sounds obvious now that I say it out loud, but it took a while to accept that I can simplify my reading by simply (!) exiting any book, magazine, article, whatever, that is not holding my attention. I’m not a student anymore. No-one is going to grade me on how well I understood the thing that was boring me silly.
I also realised that I needed to start looking at why I’d even picked up the damn thing in the first place. The best way I can share any of this is probably anecdotally…and at the point I start to bore you, please log out and go do something much more important…like making dinner, or sleeping!
I suspect I’ll come back to this topic during the year, but this was December (2025)...my latest attempt to get a grip on what I read and how and when, and maybe even why.
At the beginning of the month I’d surprised myself by actually enjoying (at the umpteenth attempt) Tolkien’s Silmarillion. Thinking it would be one to take away and struggle with in the solitude of a midwinter week by the sea, I’d romped through it and got close enough to the end to not warrant taking it away on a five-day trip. The last tale in the version I have is a stand-alone introduction to / summary of Lord of the Rings. I figured that could await my return – and when I got back I read it that first afternoon, because I actually wanted to.
This is a book I have tried so many times to read, and utterly failed to get into. If it wasn't for having inherited a Folio edition (a beautiful artefact in itself) I probably wouldn't have bothered. Certainly the paperback edition I borrowed (maybe stole?) from my brother disappeared a long while ago. Perhaps I gave it back, perhaps I gave it away, certainly I seemed to have made a decision to just not bother. And this time...this time I dove right in. My theory is that a previous month sunk in poetry magazines might have softened me up for the nature of the language. The archaic-ness of it.
So, to soften my opening argument, while I still don’t think it is worth persevering with a book that's doing nothing for you, sometimes it is worth coming back to it. Sometimes it is just about timing.
For my trip though, I rummaged through the TBR Tower and went away with Consider the Lobster (and other essays) by David Foster Wallace. I bought this on the strong recommendation of David Perell, whose podcast I love. I quickly learned that I do not love his taste in authors.
The first essay in the collection is about the porn industry. It is 50 pages long, a lot of which consists of densely-packed, small-print footnotes. This is a man not wearing his research lightly. He is going to cram in every last morsel of it. I stop reading the footnotes quite early on. I keep ploughing through the main body of the essay until I realise that I’m not resistant to the subject matter, I’m just thoroughly bored by it. It shouldn’t take 50 pages to tell us that the U.S. “adult entertainment” (viz porn) industry is peopled by sleazy men and tired overworked women. I’ll admit there’s a lot of detail I didn’t know…but none of it will I ever be able to work into even semi-polite conversation. My life may have been better for not having gone there. The sadness is that it did take me over 30 pages for my brain to finally kick in and remind me that I do NOT have to finish this drivel.
I skipped to the next essay in the hope that it might be more interesting.
Over the week I read a fair chunk of the book. For my own definition of ‘fair’. I continued to be annoyed by the foot-note overkill, and to largely ignore it. I give myself a three out of ten for how many of the essays I actually managed to read, let alone care about. The View from Mrs Thompson’s is genuinely moving. In others a few facts were things I might want to come back to. I gave up on Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky as just too dense for my little brain and didn’t even bother starting the final piece, Host. Just the look of it on the page was enough for me to know: life is too short. I switched on a True Crime tv channel instead.
If you need a filter question, here’s a check for you: if you’d rather be watching true crime on tv than reading the book-in-hand…it’s time to ditch the book.
I should, therefore, have known better than to even start Infinite Jest. Same author. Same recommendation. The critics loved it, so maybe it’s all the things they said it is. The greatest pleasure it gave me was my very early decision to just say WTF is this pretentiousness?! and place it as the first item in my next charity-shop bag.
At this point perhaps I should add that ‘drivel’ and ‘pretentiousness’ are not technical expressions, merely not-so-humble opinions, to which I am entitled. And besides DFW (who for some reason I keep wanting to call Edgar, rather than David) has no reason to care what I think.
That’s another late-coming thought about not finishing books. No author will ever know, unless you make a point of telling them. Mostly we don’t. I am making an exception here, in the remotely infinitesimally unlikely event that any named authors stumble into my much smaller world.
As ever though, happily, there is another side to the simplifying reading equation. When I give up on heavy literature I drop into The Meaning of Geese – and I stay there over two and a half days…giving up hours at a time to wander my beloved North Norfolk coast in the company of Nick Acheson as he enthuses about geese, worries about climate change and environmental challenges generally, and lets through the cracks some of his soul.
I cannot use the words I usually would about books that hold me this strongly. It held me for other reasons, maybe. The simplicity of the writing feels like an instruction in how to do it. The honesty of it. The not-hiding of how hard it is to sit in the cold for two hours – the reminder that I am not and never will be a naturalist or a nature writer. Not only do I not have the childhood background for it, I do not have the patience, nor the knowledge, nor enough years left to gain that knowledge. So I slightly envy and deeply respect those who do. He explicitly makes the point that it sounds romantic but is in fact hard work. I do not wish to start working that hard at this stage of my life.
The familiarity of the landscape has something to do with my enchantment. The fact that he references books on my own shelves in ways that make me want to read them again in a new
light. And maybe also the fact of it being a lock-down book. His reactions to that time were so different to my own, he had more contact with more people, and yet he sounds as though he found it harder than I did. We had similar reasons to be lonely having just lost people we were close to. We both went outside. He went to a lifelong passion. I went to a just-being-established garden. He counted and documented and wrote. I took photographs and wrote.
He made a book. I did not. Sometimes the connecting threads are femmer, but they are still there.
Between the two Wallace books and before Geese, I picked up a magazine. It happened to be MsLexia, but for my purposes here, that’s not especially relevant. Because it was Xmas and I was alone for the duration this was another publication that I got to dive into and stay with in a way that I previously would not have done.
I subscribe to several magazines and journals. I don’t read any of them from cover to cover. I skip the bits that don’t interest me. Like most people though, I have been in the habit of reading them in fragments. An article here, a few pages there. This time, simply because I could, I decided to stay with it, to treat it more like a book – which is not to say to attempt to read it all at one sitting, but to have it as the primary reading material on the go, to come back to it whenever I had time to read.
This produces a very different experience. I have decided that spending a couple of hours, half-a-day, or even more, with a magazine of this kind – the thoughtful kind – the intelligent kind – counts as what Julia Cameron defines as an Artist’s Date. It is a refuelling, well-refilling, activity. It allows the articles to cross-fertilise in a way that doesn’t happen if you read them in a rush on the bus.
So after the Geese, I delve into the magazine stash and come up with over a year's worth National Trust member magazines and lose most of a Sunday in between their covers, surfacing with an idea for 2026 (like I need another one! I really don't) and a wondering about the word 'toast' in the sense of raising a glass to someone.
The web search suggests it comes from the 17th century technique of dropping a piece of toast into wine to improve the flavour, and so when raising the glass to honour someone a custom that goes back to antiquity, then you would be raising the toast. I'm disappointed by that...my reading of NT mags had included an article on wassailing. Tradition has it that you thread toast on the branches of the orchard trees to attract the robins as safeguarders and seed-spredders, and then you raise your drinking vessels of cider or ale to bless and celebrate the trees. I wanted that to be the origin.
Still, I've learned a thing or two. And the to-be-read tower is slowly lowering - and is anyway not so intimidating now I know I don't actually have to read everything in there.
