My mother said to me, “I’ve just realised that now I’m in my 80s, if I’m not enjoying a book I don’t have to finish it. No teacher or parent is going to tell me off.”
This came as a great release to me too. All my life I’d felt guilty if I haven’t finished a book I’d started. I think it was my parents who instilled that in me!
After my mother had this realisation, the mobile library would park outside her house in rural Herefordshire and on each visit would unload a large batch of novels. Some would just be tasted, and put aside. Others would be read in full. On my visits I would admire the size of those two piles.
This parental permission not to finish a book has coincided with the realisation that as I have, ahem, not so many decades left there are only so many more books I’ll get to read. So why waste that time persisting with something you’re not enjoying (especially if you don’t feel that it’s nevertheless doing you good in some way)?
There is one novel I’ve had on my conscience for not finishing, but I won’t say what it is as it’s one of those most esteemed by one of my writing group. Suffice it to say that I never got to see the final score when the gods had ended their sport …. Sorry, Sarah.
Do you feel guilty if you leave a book unfinished? What book did you never get to the end of?
I feel bad saying this but I could not get into wolf hall. I gave it my best, I attempted it twice. In the end I borrowed the spoken word version and listened to it in the car. Then I attempted to read Bring up the dead. I just couldn’t get into that either and the spoken word version is read by someone else so I don’t want to listen to that either!
Oh, Em – wouldn’t life be boring if we all liked the same things? Far better to re-read something we absolutely love than force ourselves to finish something that doesn’t hit the spot.
It’s also good to remember this when submitting to agents. Just because it doesn’t appeal to one, doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be loved by another. Or so I tell myself…
Em – what a relief! Time for confession from me too – there is something about Wolf Hall that makes me feel tired! I haven’t even tried reading it yet and sit in guilty silence when all around me are talking about it. Perhaps I’ve just had too much of the Tudors … blame a youth spent reading Jean Plaidy and Margaret Irwin etc. However, Hilary Mantel’s A Change of Climate (published back in 1994) is one of those brilliant and devastating books that I will never get out of my head – definitely recommended!
Oh I do feel better Tanya 🙂 I shall look out for A Change of Climate and try that one, thank you. I too read Jean Plaidy and Margaret Irwin as a teenager all recommended by my mum, then on to her battered old copy of Anya Setons ‘Katherine’.
I have recently re-read a lot of books from my childhood, sharing with my young daughter (What Katy Did, Cats Magic by Margaret Greaves..)
Maggie – I totally agree, I have several old favourites in reserve if my library books fail me!