Reading isn’t always joyous. Sometimes, though, joy can be salvaged from the gloom.
There are occasions when a book fails to put you under its spell, when the ignition splutters and fades or the candle turns its back on the match. Your eyes move across the lines but they are shuffling rather than cantering. Words turn into bollards, sentences to blockades and paragraphs are entwined in barbed wire. To finish a chapter is to arrive flustered and late having become hopelessly lost. You revisit lines over and again, nothing much vaulting from paper to mind, and feel as if you are wading through treacle. Pages seem to be a negotiation process. The whole thing is a slog.
There are many things that can make it so: characters you don’t care for, ludicrously obscure language, Latin phrases, unpunctuated sentences longer than the Golden Gate Bridge, bemusing plots and misfiring attempts at local dialects. More likely, it is a general, intangible feeling; it is bad chemistry, you and the book just don’t get on. There is no anticipation, no excitement when you think about opening the book’s pages while commuting or in bed. This feeling can even trigger an existential crisis – has the love gone, are reading and I over? To banish such thoughts, you may battle on with the book, stoic as Sisyphus.
Embedded within the reader is a feeling that to give up on a book is sacrilege, that such an act contravenes some oath or purity law, or represents a failure on your part. Worse, you are abandoning this living object, leaving a child to drown at sea. What of the poor author? You are dismissing their toil, shooing away the servant with the back of your hand. All of this is underpinned by niggling fears, reasons for persisting and blind faith in books – that this one will ‘get going soon’, that the plot will click, that thistly lines will begin to sing as you get used to this writer’s way, that, in short, all will be well. You are governed by stubbornness and a completist’s fear that a book can never be known or justifiably criticised until it has been read to the end.
Then one day, you just do it. You give up. You snap. It is a liberation. All is clear. You see that life is too short for bad books and struggling on. It is an epiphany. There is a funeral ceremony for the book: you shake your head, sigh or swear, pull away the bookmark, fan through the pages one last time, clap it shut, and take one final glance before tossing it down on the floor like an Edwardian schoolmaster dismissing an essay. Do not mourn nor feel guilty. This was a destructive relationship. You have found sweet release. There are plenty more books on the shelf.