Kwak's place

When I was a freshman in high school, we had to write a certain number of book reports on “classics” a quarter in order to get an A. My teacher came up with an idea that was supposed to make reading fun and inspire creativity: we would make book covers for the books we reviewed.

I had a ton of fun making these imaginary book covers (the one for Dune used up all my tan-colored crayons, if I remember correctly), but the project had one flaw which I quickly realized. Book covers by nature provide only a cliffhanger synopsis of book’s first half, therefore, I had no incentive to actually finish a novel that was boring.

Now that I’m an adult who has spent a good part of her life finishing books she wasn’t interested in because of her educational path, I know that I have better things to be doing with my time.

I’ve argued with many people about whether or not I should finish books that I find boring. To me, the question comes down to whether or not the book is good for me. Is celery good for me? Yes, so I will eat it although I find it boring. Is Haruki Murakami good for me? He certainly is popular among professors that I respect, but his random diatribes against feminism annoy me in a manner that far outweighs the annoyance caused by a few sticks of celery.

I once dated a guy who always finished books. When we argued about whether or not it was necessary (we graduated with the same English Lit degree), his main point was that sometimes a mediocre book could be saved by a great ending, and that if you didn’t read to the end, you’d miss the life-changing finale.

My response: I just get pissed off if an author somehow manages to summon up enough talent to pull off a good ending. Why couldn’t s/he have gotten hir act together for the preceding 200 pages?

I’ve often caught my mother in the act of finishing books that she’s not enjoying. Sometimes those books were loaned by someone who’s feelings she doesn’t want to hurt (and I’ll admit I rarely get up the courage to tell people that their taste in books is sucky in comparison to my much more refined tastes), but sometimes she’s just sighed and told me, well, I’ve gotten this far….

A bad book takes so much more time to read than a bad movie. Don’t waste your life, people!

What got me started on this rant? I actually intended to write a book report on Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine (which I liked immensely except for that one night of nightmares), but my opening paragraphs about my high school book report days sent me off on a tangent. Blogging about books + Deschutes Inversion IPA = Tangential posts.

I probably still need more time to process the Bradbury anyway. I’ll post about it tomorrow.