In No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy, Mark Hodkinson discusses the common reader conundrum: when do you abandon a book? Hodkinson is confident in his technique, if the book doesn’t hook him quickly, he lets it go. Plenty of other writers and reviewers have addressed the issue. Some say deciding not to finish a book is a failure (we abandoned the book!) or whether it’s a strength (as Hodkinson says he doesn’t “owe the author anything.”) It seems as you get older the awareness creeps in that you can’t possibly read every book you’d want to in your lifetime so why waste time? I’ve always considered myself a reader who can hold on until the end and sometimes that really pays off. Plenty of novels with slower starts build to an amazing finish. But there’s nothing more disappointing than putting your faith in a book that never really builds to anything. The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides was one of those books for me (the only upside being that it was a book club choice meaning at least I got to talk about my disappointment). Everything about the book (a novel about a young woman at an important point in her life with her background and interest in literature) made me sure I would enjoy it, but in the end Eugenides treatment of his main character left a bad taste in my mouth. He presented his main character as foolish, vain, and shallow and yet also somehow worthy of an entire novel. He made it clear he thinks young women who study literature mostly think about men and marriage at the end of their educational journey. A novelist doesn’t have to love all their characters, but I would hope they’d believe them worthy of a reader’s time. I shouldn’t have finished it. I should have put it down and spent my time with another book and another writer.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t read books that push your boundaries or evoke emotion – books can offer you worlds and experiences you’ve never seen and maybe never will. But if one writer doesn’t grab your attention, I’m sure there are others within the genre that will. And you can’t always assume that a writer you love will always write exactly what you want either – which is my current struggle. 

I know exactly what I didn’t like about The Marriage Plot but I’m still not sure why I haven’t connected with Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. I’ve even put it down and come back to it to see if a change in mood will help me, but it hasn’t and yet I can’t let it go (I know, I know but that’s the title!). In all likelihood it’s my love of some of Ishiguro’s other writing (both Remains of the Day and Klara and the Sun are fantastic) making it hard to move on. Or maybe it’s because old habits die hard and with only 150 pages… only 100 pages… only 80 pages left it seems silly not to just finish.

I probably wouldn’t have picked up Never Let Me Go if I hadn’t loved Klara and the Sun so much, but Ishiguro’s amazing examination of humanity and childhood through the perspective of a futuristic/light sci-fi setting and a robot main character blew me away so when I found a $5.00 paperback in Boston of his earlier foray into a different/futuristic world I didn’t hesitate. Now most of the way through the novel I connect with the purpose of the novel as he examines different aspects of childhood and being a teenager with something else lurking beneath the surface (although I don’t fully know the twist yet with only 80 pages left I have enough so far to understand the outline of this new world he’s built). I don’t hate the main characters. I don’t hate the settings or themes. But I haven’t been pulled in… I tried to let it be a bedside read that I pick up and put down when I just need something for a few minutes before bed but it’s so short and calls back frequently to details in earlier chapters it was jarring to pick it up and put it down between other books.

Today is a quiet Sunday and I don’t have much to do so to be honest I am probably going to finish the book, even though I have plenty of other books to read. I feel like the final section will reveal the twists and the mystery behind this alternate reality which will make it worth finishing. But I also kind of wish I’d put it down 20 pages in and let it go – I’m sure Ishiguro will never know and even if somehow he did I doubt he’d care and if the author doesn’t care then why on earth should I worry about it?

But we are living in a world where we are constantly reminded of the limits and the morality of humanity.  Hodkinson’s 20-page rule is a bit drastic for me at this point in my reader life, but I don’t know that one day I won’t reach it. Maybe I wish I already had… either way I’m probably going to finish Never Let Me Go but I certainly hope the next book I don’t connect with will release me.