Why Can't I Finish Books?

It’s almost the end of the year, so I’ve been revisiting the books I had cast aside unfinished to now hastily finish before the next calendar year. The Goodreads goal of unsatisfying end of the year numbers is an annual curse. But now, I’m questioning why I didn't finish these various books. It is not necessarily a reflection of the author’s efforts or completely mood dependent. In order to amuse ourselves we must ask: what if it’s a problem with society? Short attention spans. There’s no more original ideas. Publishing editors are overworked and authors are difficult artists, so the product is unpolished. Consumerist culture has ruined even the imaginative process of reading. Comedy isn’t funny and drama isn’t exciting. Nihilism! Postmodernism! Post-postmodernism! It’s all these reasons in context of personal whim and taste. And some books are just bad. But the real reason I can’t finish books is that it’s a crisis of faith — something interferes with the spark of belief that allows the match of literary magic to light, and snaps the overstriked match in two. Don’t worry, though, you’re only one crunch-crackle away from your tiny torch lighting again.

I am going to list the books I didn’t finish in the last year or so to help reason my way through why my strikes haven't been right. This is confessional hour.

I will begin with the most shameful one: The Liar’s Club by Mary Karr.

One of the pillars of the modern memoir. I truly loved the first seventy pages I read, and my fingers tingled with each page, eager to turn. Her turns of phrase were both writerly and lived-in; this book just had it! Honestly, maybe I put it down because it made me feel untalented and uninteresting. I think I wanted to delay the attachment I knew I would have to the book, for the human desire to withhold emotion knows no bounds. Karr wrote in the introduction to the twentieth-anniversary edition about the readers’ reception to the book that “Its publication constructed for me–in midlife, unexpectedly–what I’d hankered so desperately for as a dreamy kid comforted only by reading: that mythic village of the like-minded souls who bloom together by sharing old tales– the kind that fire you up and set you loose, the true kind,” that centralized the practice of storytelling amongst her and her readers in a mutual affection. This one I will finish.

Last year, I never finished Beautiful World, Where are You? by Sally Rooney. Somehow, I want to blame this one on Lana Del Rey. Lana’s stylistic preference for aesthetic over everything combined with both boring prose and melodic pearls is completely genius. Strangely, Sally Rooney is a genius in the same way. Rooney extracts inane paragraphs about the plastic usage at the corner Pret A Manger, but there’s something about her word atmospheres that are so memorable. They stick to the roof of your mouth like caramel candy. Even though it’s effective, I don’t particularly like Sally Rooney’s style (or caramel candy). Conversations with Friends is the true cause of my distaste for Rooney, but I did enjoy reading a borrowed copy of Normal People in my old apartment’s ill-constructed bathtub until the water ran cold. Her characters are always a little insufferable, so I lost the will to care about this third book’s plot. I got the vibe, and they’re vibe books anyway. Playlist culture of cherry picking songs off albums has made me a vibe and go reader. I’m an old person that leaves a concert before the encore to beat the traffic. To be honest, though, I know I’ll at least attempt her next book too.

Memorial by Bryan Washington. Yikes, I got more than halfway through this one, in which there was a perspective shift, and I gave up. I had been coaxing myself into sticking with the specific narrative arcs of the first protagonist, a journey I had no intention of repeating for the second protagonist. It was September; I had a soaring August of falling in love with reading again, and Memorial caused a tailspin back into a slump. I enjoyed that the book was set in Houston, but only in concept. Washington’s writing was fairly funny and thoughtful, but I really just didn’t care about the romantic relationship between Mike and Benson since they spent the majority of the narrative apart. Sorry to these men! Perspective shifts should be used sparingly as if we are rationing iPhone usage on a night-out without a charger or candles during a blackout. I’ve found that contemporary literature can karren you into the wind of reading quickly or be a huge gust of hot air that knocks you to your knees while you look to the sky in a state of hopelessness, promising to never read a book that was recommended by a morning talk show host ever again.

Novels are already objects that remark upon the fictitious and rule-driven nature of time; we don’t need to actualize the metaphor with actual time travel. In my mission to read all of Margaret Atwood’s books, so I can stay fun and shrewish forever, I tried to read The Blind Assassin. In the first chapter, a sister drives off a cliff and another sister talks on the phone about the “dead” sister, knowing her sister is not dead — time travel uncloaks herself! No, not at this time, Miss Atwood. Much later in the year, I borrowed This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub from Shannon in the hopes that the thrill of someone else’s book could propel me to actually finish a machine-glued stack of sentences. Despite my time travel evasion, I start the book, then Straub hits me with Dying Father as the catalyst for the protagonist to time travel. I let out a theatrical sigh. After ninety pages of lifeless response from my imagination kingdom, I etch ‘I don’t care about time travel’ into each one of my memory stones and let the tome collect dust before I return it to Shannon. Sometimes, our preferences become rules we make for ourselves to protect our minds from hours wasted. (Although, Kindred by Octavia Butler defies my rule and is a fantastic time travel book.)

In the theme of genre and/or structural issues, I am short-story intolerant. What am I supposed to do with a book of short story? Certainly not read it in its entirety. No one in the history of humanity has read the entirety of a short story collection, so I really shouldn’t feel guilty. Florida by Lauren Groff was assigned as class reading for my last semester of college, and I waded through the Floridian waters of Groff’s prose populated by abandoned children, animals on the loose, and potential cannibalism with curiosity. I adored Groff’s writing and urged myself to finish the collection beyond the classroom, but I didn’t. Reading Florida, though, absolutely was a spark to savor Groff's books of Matrix, Arcadia, and Fates and Furies as high priorities on my to-read list. A few years ago, I tried to read Daddy by Emma Cline, because I never read The Girls and I was intrigued by the splashy title and yellow cover. There’s a story about a young woman selling her used underwear online and to men in parked lots that I think a lot about in moments of financial insecurity. But that woman drifted off the page after a maximum of thirty pages, and the high turnover rate of characters in short story collections is not profitable for the business of my attention span.

Finally, I shall confess the books in which I only read a meager chapter or two, because I have a personal affinity for the concept of the unfinished. I read the first chapter of Trust Exercise by Susan Choi during my lunch break. I knew people had very mixed thoughts on Choi’s winning of the National Book Award for this one, and even Goodreads reviewers were confused if they liked it or not. I didn’t feel like being confused; I wanted to love something right away. I had attention to give, but conscientiously. I told Julie I was hesitant to finish it and she thereafter told me the entire plot, so I gave back my library copy. Another book that promised uncertainty in reading was Blueberries by Ellena Savage. The description persuaded me of an experimental memoir interspersed with poems and themes and research and asides which sounded just pretentious enough for me. One of my favorite poems is “Here There are Blueberries” by Mary Syzbist, in which blueberries are a symbol of joy, so I wanted to see Savage’s symbolism of blueberries. Unfortunately, I never found out her take on the fruit metaphor, despite my interest in her writing style in the first essay “The Yellow Room.” The essay reckons with the writer’s return to Spain a decade after she was sexually assaulted there. The essay was weighty material at times, but a well-constructed narrative in her experimental form, so I wanted to end the experience early for fear of drudgery in the coming chapters that lacked the skill of the first. I’ll discover blueberries some other time. I had bought a copy of George Eliot by Jennifer Uglow years ago and had little luck in removing the Half Price Books sticker without a gritty residue. The literary persona of women writers of the 19th century will always prickle my reading desire, so a biography about the infamous Mary Evans appealed to my forsaken love of classic Brit Lit. I was instantly rewarded with characterizations of Eliot as ego-driven and praise-hungry in constant friction between the strict expectation of 19th century femininity. Eliot’s denial and deification of herself makes her a fascinating writer, but I lacked the stamina to study her as observantly as I wished. I wanted to use her for research, and I do not think she wanted to be used. She became evidence of my own writing realizations rather than inspiration herself, so I slipped her to the back of my book stacks, promising to come back and let her rage in my mind with greater attention during some other far away hours.

That concludes the confession, I’m yanking the curtain back for more light now.

I don’t think I don’t finish books because I’m not paying attention, though I think I tend to use my reading habits as a way to strike on the box of my own imagination. Sometimes the flame only flirts with its identity as a glow of gas, or sizzles to nothing before it can even burn. Sometimes I try to analyze too quickly before the blue of the flame blooms, but the real heat of the author’s care is lost to the dark. I twirl the lit match around with my two fingers to see the fire race to my holding thumb — I strike the air so fire achieves an early extinguishment. I have no destination for the flame, an unpurposeful lighting. My purpose for reading isn’t always right, but I don’t really believe that finishing the book is the only purpose of reading. It’s not about that, but you don’t really know what reading is about until much later– until the words inhabit the box of your brain. The text on Diamond’s kitchen set of match boxes says, ‘CAUTION: CLOSE BOX BEFORE STRIKING MATCH’ to prevent all of the other matches from igniting at the strike of your match, subsequently causing the entire box to ignite. So maybe the magic of one literary match-striking experience can light all the other stored literary matches, destroying your entire mind enclosure. (But that’s only if we’re tracking my metaphor work.) The box also says ‘KEEP AWAY FROM CHILDREN,’ so tell your neighborhood kids to stop reading. It's dangerous.