Impatient reading.

It’s been an awfully long time since I’ve written about books – partly because my reading has slowed down lately, but also because I haven’t read a ton of stuff that’s affected me enough to rant or rave. Mostly the books I am reading are well-told stories but not much else. Enjoyable. Forgettable. Which is what happens when you just allow books to enter your life rather than consciously seeking out the things you’ve always wanted to read. Sometimes serendipitous, but mostly just providing a cover for gapping out of life once and a while.

But I just finished a book which really irked me on some level which lead to a discussion between my literary workmates about the phenomena of “books that are really annoying but leave one feeling compelled to find out the story arch which encourages a very very fast reading just to get them over with”. I really wish there was a word to sum up that particular feeling of irritation because it is a tad wordy to describe – but you readers out there must know what I’m talking about, right?

It’s not every annoying book of course. Some books don’t inspire me to finish for any reason; I am content to put them down two or three chapters in (bad writing, stupid characters, plot that isn’t going to hold up) and discard them with the next cull of the bookshelf. Usually with those novels there is more than a single thing wrong with them and so deigning to read them seems like a big waste of time. The particular phenomenom I am referring to above happens generally when only one element is irksome. The plot usually is intact and somewhat compelling, but it’s some other piece that doesn’t quite work. Most often, it’s when I realize that none of the characters are sympathetic and/or their choices seem unfathomable or ridiculous to me. One bad choice I can forgive, but by the time we get to three or four (one wrong turn always begets another), I have switched into full-blown impatient reading mode.

Two of those which I have written about previously are Peter Carey’s His Illegal Self, and Ian McEwan’s Atonement.

The one that sparked the discussion today is Alice Sebold’s latest work The Almost Moon which starts out promisingly enough when the main character kills her aging (senile) mother in a fit during caregiving, but then turns into a series of errors painful to read about. A bit like watching someone in a horror movie – you know if they make “that” decision (to open the door, to enter the dark house, to laugh at fate) then it will necessarily result in the unraveling of everything else. Is it realistic that a character would make these decisions? Or is the author merely putting the character through the paces in order to see what might happen? (Apparently Sebold couldn’t decide in this case because the book ends abruptly and with no resolution for the main character.) You read because you honestly want to know how the author resolves the plot, while remaining completely unsympathetic to their personalities and choices throughout.

It’s a paradoxical feeling, to be tantalized and yet repelled. And it may sound strange, but by the end of books like these I feel a little bit used. Like I was just along on an author’s uncomfortable joyride, not one that I would have ever chosen for myself. Fortunately, I can read quickly – not too much of time gets wasted at the very least.

(I will say that Sebold’s previous work Lovely Bones was an excellent, if odd, piece of fiction and she is a very readable writer which is part of what lead me to this book.)

In any event, I am feeling the need to be a bit more directed in my reading over the next little while and to that end I have ordered second-hand copies of Pat Barker’s 2nd and 3rd books in the Regeneration Trilogy (one of which won the Booker). I read the first novel a few years ago and loved it, so I’ve decided to read the whole lot from start to finish once I’m done with a book of hers I’ve just borrowed from a friend – Border Crossing. I’ve got tons of books on the “to-read” pile at the moment, but I do want to make sure I get a quality read or two in before the end of summer!