Not Finishing Novels

I remember the first book I never finished reading, Cervantes’ Don Quixote.

It was the summer of 2005 and I was living on the Nestucca Bay National Wildlife Refuge and I had just completed my first year teaching at Taft High School in Lincoln City.

There I was on the lawn, on a sunny summer day, my three dogs around me, and I just shut the book and said no more. I was at least 150 pages in and could not continue. The moment I closed the book the recognition of it being the first I had never finished hit me. A little sadness followed. It was quite a streak.

Less than a decade later, I stopped reading the second book of my life, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. I lasted 50 pages and felt so inert reading this writer’s prose, that why continue?

So that made two in almost 40 years of reading books. If the occasion called for it, I always plowed through and I sometimes wondered why.

Since Franzen, I have stopped reading books with a little more frequency, maybe once a year.

But in recent weeks, I stopped reading five novels!

They were Rickshaw, Chinese Revolution proletarian novel so utterly bleak without any hope of light or redemption that it had to be closed.

Martin Chuzzlewhite by Charles Dickens: introduction great—the first 40 pages exhausting and almost impossible to follow. So why follow?

Vertigo by WG Sebald: I read it 20+ years ago and it exerted a tremendous influence on me during my research for and writing of the Vortex I rock festival book. This time—20 pages in—it was just too opaque and digressive. Does it count as an unfinished book if you once finished it but 20 years later, can’t?

My Struggle by a Norwegian author: Volume 1 of a 2700-page series that obviously borrows from Proust In Search of Lost Time. The first 50 pages were so insular and full of flashbacks and references to a writer that there was no way to go forward with its non story.

An early Richard Powers novel that I no longer recall its title. It was so artificially intellectual and overwrought with its erudition.

All five of these books are now resting in street libraries in my neighborhood and perhaps they will connect with someone else.

Some random thoughts on this new habit of not finishing novels:

I’m older so maybe I don’t fell like I have to waste on a book that doesn’t connect to me. I mean, I am giving these books 50 or so pages.

Every unfinished book has been a novel and written by a male.

I no longer read for the writer’s technique or style.

I want movement.

I don’t want fancy.

I want some guts.

I want to learn something but not through pedantry or preciousness.

Sometimes I want to be entertained when I read.

Sometimes I want to marvel at a writer’s creation of characters. Rereading Sherlock Holmes stories last year was like that.

I want to read something that my inform my own writing and that usually comes from something discovered at sheer random in a street library.

As of the moment, I am reading an excellent biography of Jimmy Carter. It’s almost reading as semi-optimistic prequel to a dark and greedy and amoral dystopian novel that Ronald Reagan inaugurated after he defeated Carter in the 1980 election, the one on full display in 2024 but only much more terrible than any of us could have ever imagined after Reagan’s two terms ended.

I’m on the lookout for a new novel to read. It will appear. One always does.