Sophie has been clearing her virtual shelves and wonders about the books she left unfinished
Since I was a child, I’ve had a near obsession about finishing any book I’ve started, particularly novels. Once I’ve committed to the characters I really have to know what happens to them. Until I know, I get restless. It’s like waiting for the other shoe to drop.
So it was a shock to find recently that this lifetime quirk seems to have deserted me. Well, at least as far as e-books are concerned.
It seems I’ve been leaving books unfinished in a big way. Sometimes half way through. Sometimes nearly complete. And I’ve abandoned them!
All these unmatched shoes spinning around in the aether, defying gravity. Until, presumably they fall to earth, long after the end of civilisation.
It doesn’t bear thinking about.
What Price Closure?
And yes, these are all books I’ve bought. Not the extremely useful samples that Amazon offers before you put your money down.
I never leave those samples hanging if I decide not to buy them. It’s a courtesy thing. Sort of like putting a book back on the library shelf from where you got it, I suppose. Or not keeping a friend hanging on, if you decide you can’t make their concert/children’s Nativity play/party.
But these are all books I’d paid good money for. And then made a deliberate decision to walk away leaving them unfinished? Not even a skip-read to the end to find out how it ended? Rejection without closure.
It worried me. It felt wrong, somehow. Not me, as I’ve always thought of myself.
I had to know why.
How I Got Here
What happened was this: I was trying to find a book I was pretty certain that I had in my Kindle archive*. I knew what it was about. Dammit, I could even remember a particularly telling phrase from it. But I couldn’t accurately remember either the author or the title. Actually, even the telling phrase wasn’t precise enough for Google to identify it.
With a physical book, of course, I would know whereabouts it would be on my bookshelves. I could have tracked it down on one of two or three possible sites and there it would be. But not on Kindle. I’d have to work out when I downloaded the thing.
Well, it turns out that I had an Amazon library of more than 2,000 books.
(If you want to know how many you have stored, go to the Amazon entry page and scroll down from your account – three in from the right on the top bar – to Manage My content and Devices.)
Of course many of mine are old friends. Some I revisit regularly. (Anyone else in love with Murderbot?) Some I’m glad to have, because they reflect bits of my life that I will go back to when I feel nostalgic. All those were keepers. And I’ve finished them multiple times.
Unfinished but Still Alluring
Some are research books I bought to consult for some book or paper I was writing and haven’t looked at since. But, aha! I might want to consult them in the future. Keepers again.
But a surprising number of these unfinished books had titles I didn’t recognise. Even when I called them up, I often couldn’t remember buying or reading any part of them.
One or two were a delight. I have no idea why I dropped out too early. For instance, this time I read author Holly Smale’s YA novel Geek Girl in a sitting, loved every minute of it and bought the sequel.
*The book I was looking for when all this started was Spreading my Wings. One of those research books where I’d already read and used the bit I wanted. Certainly a keeper. Diana Barnato Walker was genuinely awesome, in every sense of the word.
Reasons for Walking Away
But the rest! When I started to read – well skim – these books I made notes on why I’d dropped them mid-read.
Almost immediately I found only a few rang a bell with me. Mostly these were so-called psychological thrillers. I left them unfinished at the point where they turned my stomach. And I had always bought them on the recommendation of a trusted friend who just didn’t have nightmares about that sort of thing. Whereas I do. Some of the most successful writers of the day turned up in this group.
Ducking out close to the end was an extreme example of this. It was dread. As I read, I was beginning to see that something horrible was coming and I needed to back into the real world pretty sharpish and have a nice cup of tea and NOT COME BACK, ever. There was a time when I did not run away when the dread started to rise. (Hawksmoor, anyone?) But I was younger then, braver; and I had no trouble sleeping.
Another reason for leaving a book unfinished was simple disbelief. Why I stopped believing was pretty varied. Oddly, it never occurred in fantasy or science fiction. It was the unrelieved cosy world, the ineffably mature woman who was always right, the belligerent alpha male, the “feisty” heroine picking a pointless fight over nothing that got me, time and again.
“Bah,” I said, as Vladimir Brusiloff had said before me. “I spit me of them.”
And deleted these files with a heartfelt blow of my mighty thumb.
Main Reason to Press the Delete Button
Boredom, plain and simple. To my shame, I suppose.
These came in all genres and sizes and I could not remember a thing about any of them. The only reason to believe that I had read them at all was that when I opened the file, it took me to somewhere in the middle of the book.
The least was 7%. To be fair to myself, that was after three solid screens of continuous prose without a single paragraph break. My eyeballs were revolving in opposite directions by the time I managed to cut and run.
The longest was 40% and although I didn’t remember the characters or the plot, I did remember that I was reading it on a train to the North. I had a window seat and every so often I would raise my eyes to rain-soaked landscape and wish I was out in it, with rain running down my neck and the prospect of a good fire and home with a good Wodehouse.
And then I would sigh, and plunge back into the exquisitely written, minutely observed sensations of a protagonist who badly needed to get a life, any life. Or at least another dimension. And a bunch of characters who all spoke in exquisitely phrased, minutely precise sentences.
And were all made out of ticky tacky and all came out the same.
Forgettable Book, Memorable Experience
I remember I stuck with it grimly, even when I had to change trains. But the time I could bear to spend reading got shorter and shorter. My speed of actually taking in the arid stuff drifted from determinedly steady… to plod… to crawl…
By the time I got off at Penrith, I promised myself I would go back and finish the book, exquisitely crafted and minutely drawn though it was, when I had more energy. A lot more energy.
Result? I have never had enough to dive back into that deep, deep sea of tedium again. I will never have enough. It is over.
Slowly and reverently, with unutterable gratitude to the Universe, my opposable thumb and Amazon, I pressed that delete button.
And I am free.
Sophie
Excellent blog, Sophie. I think my kindle library is over 3000 titles, and I don’t think I’ve deleted any of them. But there are hundreds I haven’t read or haven’t finished. I’m with you on the dread factor, and also the dreary so-called literary works that need an editor’s blue pencil — not that it even exists any more. I always mean to read the excerpt on amazon before buying, but often forget. Or I trust the recommendation. But the biggest DNF (did not finish) factor is boredom. So many books I buy are what I call “domino books” where one or two chapters in, I can predict exactly what’s going to happen — and I don’t mean who will end up with whom. That’s a given in romance. But how they get there is the real story, and when it’s completely predictable, or banal, it’s a waste of my time. I do often skip to the last one or two chapters, and generally find out that my predictions were right.
But I’ve been culling real books. My eyesight is deteriorating, so these days I read almost entirely on kindle. The exception is research books. I like to flip real pages there, and can remember roughly where in the book a piece of information I want is, whereas I can’t do that with an e-book. So I’ve been giving away hundreds of books, culling them to fit into my newly built bookshelves, keeping beloved books but also buying them as e-books for rereading pleasure. Once that’s done, I will start on culling the e-books.
I’ve always deleted samples, whether I bought the book or not. About five years ago I started deleting books knew I wasn’t going to read again. But that still left dump-in-the-corner which has left me uneasy. And finding Geek Girl confirmed that , just as much as all the stuff I deleted.
I’ve been culling real books too. Pure shelf space. But I agree about remembering the physicality of books. I was looking for a sentence from an essay by Bernard Levin on the opera Festival at Wexford the other day, and I knew exactly where to find it on the page. Made the search so easy!
I’m with you on the dread factor, Sophie, and also on boredom.
One other factor that leads me to leave books unfinished is repetition. For example, I read the first book in a dragon fantasy series and absolutely loved it. Got book 2 from the library and read about half of it. Stopped. Why? Because it felt to me like a rehash of book 1, just in slightly different locations. And each book was hundreds of pages long. It sat by my bed for weeks and eventually I returned it to the library unfinished. Not going to read it again, or book 3 in the series. It reminded me of the film Jaws 2, which seemed to be just a rehash of the original Jaws and even included some of the unused special effects from the first film, I believe.
I know what you mean about repetition in series, Joanna. Some people handle it brilliantly but others keep inserting info dumps that interrupt the story so badly that you wonder if there really is a story there. Agree, I don’t read on in the series after that.
I really enjoyed this blog, Sophie. There was a time – decades ago – when I finished every book I read. I have lived overseas in places where there were no libraries, no shops… The only books available were those brought in by people returning from leave which were passed around the small community. I remember being distraught at leaving my copy of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, half read, in the seat pocket of the plane. I kept up the habit for many years, but there came a time when I realised that life was too short for boring books. I was reading one this weekend but on reaching chapter eight realised I wasn’t engaged by the writing, the plot or the characters. I have deleted it from my Kindle library, along with another recent read that disappointed and one that despite its acclaim, I found unreadable. No punctuation or paragraphs… Why? Bemused of Sussex.
We’re clearly soul mates on this issue, Liz.
I’m such a fan of abandoning books any time I feel like it. Life’s too short and there are too many books out there to waste time with one that’s lost me. My key measure is caring. If I cease to care what happens to the characters I’m gone!
I should have taken your correspondence course a long time ago, Katy.
I used to feel sort of sorry and a bit protective of a book that wasn’t really holding me. And, of course, there’s that old Puritanical guilt about not giving up once you’ve set your hand to the plough.
Even now, I’ll plod through the longueurs if something has caught my attention. But I agree, once I stop caring about the characters I’m done these days, too.