And this week’s meme is…
“Life is too short to read bad books.” I’d always heard that, but I still read books through until the end no matter how bad they were because I had this sense of obligation.
That is, until this week when I tried (really tried) to read a book that is utterly boring and unrealistic. I had to stop reading.
Do you read everything all the way through or do you feel life really is too short to read bad books?
Ha! If it was only bad books that I didn’t read to the end that would be perfectly acceptable. But what about the good books? Of course, I might argue that I don’t drop the literary but impenetrable book; it drops me…
I do remember a time when I read every novel to the end even if it was execrable.
With my new improved literary horizons, life is too short, but I occasionally harbour the niggling doubt that a perceived badness is virtuoso genre-rule breaking… Literally so bad, it’s good. The truly bad book I drop like a shot. Largely to avoid writing a negative review. My book of mind-numbing banality may be the next person’s favourite comfort read…
To read, when one does so of one’s own free will, is to make a volitional statement, to cast a vote; it is to posit an elsewhere and set off toward it. And like any traveling, reading is at once a movement and a comment of sorts about the place one has left. To open a book voluntarily is at some level to
remark the insufficiency either of one’s life or one’s orientation toward it.
