Dear Abandoned Read, It’s You and It’s Me

200 pages in: I love the voice, the style, the rhythm – but the characters, the story, no: I just don’t care.

And lo the record stands: though I’ve read all of this particular author’s work, the first book remains the only book in their oeuvre that I’ve read to completion.

It’s never an easy decision, abandoning a read – especially if the problem isn’t that the book is terrible but rather that it just doesn’t harmonize with the song in my head. Does it make me a quitter? Is there something I’m just not seeing? Perhaps my taste is off? Maybe if I kept going, everything would come together and the genius praised across countless reviews and articles and panegyrics would stand revealed?

I’ll have to live with letting those questions linger as the book in frustration joins its brethren in the box destined for the used bookstore and hope that someone somewhere will find the joy in the work that so eludes me.

Onward, then, into the next word-world that waits upon the great pile.