I’m generally a completionist. I don’t like to leave books half-read, and I can probably fit the books I’ve started but not finished into one blog post:
- American Gods, by Neil Gaiman: I actually read more than half of this and then just…stopped. It sat next to my bed for almost a year before I took it to one of those little free libraries. I also watched the first five or so episodes of the TV adaptation with my roommates, and then we all stopped. (I think. Maybe they finished without me.)
- The Infernal, by Mark Doten: I think I tried to read this at the wrong time, made it five pages in, and then determined that the timing was wrong and I wasn’t in a mood for not having the faintest idea what was going on. But I just read a review of this that intrigued me, so maybe I’ll go back to it…
- Authority, by Jeff VanderMeer: I read the first book in the trilogy, Annihilation, and found it difficult to get through but still intriguing, but I waded a third of the way into this second part and thought, “I am just not enjoying this and I don’t see that changing.
- The Castle, by Franz Kafka: Can I make the excuse that I didn’t finish this because…Kafka didn’t either? Granted, he got much farther than I did…I’ve probably read the first three chapters of The Castle three separate times and renewed it 18 times from the Brooklyn Public Library, after which they finally denied me more renewals and I took it as a sign. While I was reading it, I was generally enjoying it – I just didn’t ever feel like picking it up again afterwards, and kept forgetting what I’d already read. I told my boyfriend that maybe part of my resistance was the knowledge that the book was unfinished and I would never know the actual ending, to which he responded, “That doesn’t make sense. It’s like life! No one knows how they’re going to die, but that doesn’t make living not worth it.” Because of general stubbornness I responded that often people do in fact know how they’re going to die, but that the comparison isn’t a useful one anyway…and that’s a hill I’m willing to die on. Especially since, in that case, I’ll know that I’m going to die on a hill.
- (pending) The Sellout, by Paul Beatty: This was an office book-exchange book three years ago (well, 2.5). I don’t have a good excuse for why it took me so long to start it other than that no one was going to start charging me 10 cents a day for leaving it on my shelf, unfinished. Like The Castle, I’ve read the beginning three times so far. But I’m not giving up on this one yet.
