I was reading a message board thread a few weeks ago about how many pages folks would read into a book before they decided not to finish it. The discussion made me really think about the evolution of my own reading habits.
When
I was younger, I read the whole thing because... well, that's just what
you do, right? I didn't question much of anything before the age of
13. Including the protocol of reading books. I was a voracious reader,
and just plowed through everything I read.
Later on, I still
read books all the way through, but more because I was an aspiring writer, and
I felt like I should give the author a chance to paint their full
picture. I saw a book as a canvas. Sometimes the parts were lesser
than the whole, and reading the full book would fill in all the
blanks. Sometimes this just meant I wasted time on mediocre books, but
other times it was rewarding (Frank Herbert's
Dune series for instance).
I
tempered this a bit when working at the local library. If a book didn't really grab me, that was okay. I still walked away with an
idea of what the author's prose and technique were like, and the themes
of the book, so even if I returned the book without finishing, I still
had enough of a grasp of it to be helpful to library patrons if they asked me for
recommendations.
I also started doing book reviews around this
time, and sometimes there just wasn't enough time to linger on a book --
I had to get it done and assessed by the deadline. This really helped
me think critically about what I was reading, and why it did or didn't
hook me, and what qualities it might (or might not) have that I had to
gauge regardless of my personal preferences.
The next step was
when I opened my used bookshop. All the skimming skills I picked up at the library had to kick
into high gear -- customers weren't borrowing these books for free, so
the stakes of recommending books to someone were much higher. I take my
job pretty seriously, and I do my best to help my customers spend their
money carefully.
These last couple of changes in my reading
habits were more on a professional level -- my personal reading stayed
on its own track for the most part. I still didn't feel beholden to
finish a book if it wasn't grabbing me, but I did give it an honest try
in respect to the author and the piece of work.
Then even my personal reading habits changed in response to a series of events.
Over the course of a year, I found myself in the position to help
dissolve and re-house the personal libraries of two different friends,
both of them writers and avid book-lovers, both of whom died suddenly
from heart attacks with no warning. I had to handle this
professionally, assisting the families with my expertise and heavy labor
when they were just coming out of the shock of unexpected bereavement
-- coping better but still overwhelmed.
My grief for these two
was brought to bear on the number of books they had on their shelves
that had obviously not been read yet. I began to think of the number of
books I had yet to read, and for a time my reading choices were laser-focused, channeling an urgency I had never felt before.
Thankfully, that urgency has been tempered, because there is
nothing like the untrammeled joy of picking up a book and taking it home just because it looks tasty.
It
still flares up from time to time, but this is helpful in small bits.
It means my "to read" pile gets weeded out on a regular basis to
eliminate the flash-in-the-pan appeal of certain books that (to be honest)
I know I'll never actually get around to reading.
Instead, I'll add the title to
my "To Read" list in case I do want to read it some day in the
future when I have time (ha!). This allows me to put the book itself back
in circulation freely, without any wistful longing to hang onto it.
I
have also stopped making New Years resolutions -- instead I make two or
three lists of 10-20 books apiece that I want to read during the year,
including a "Books I Should Have Read by Now" list. It's working out
pretty great so far -- I'm on my third year of doing this now, with at
least a 50% success rate (often more) for each of the little lists.
How do you guys direct your own reading choices to get to the books you wind up actually reading?
(IF you've read this far in my surprisingly long post! Where did all that come from?!)
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