ELIZABETH COMMITS...SORT OF

When I first started reading (my mother told me I was four), I had an insatiable appetite for stories. I went through “age appropriate” books very quickly. So I moved on to the kind of stories that Mom and Dad used to read to me.

I still have many of those animal tales from the north woods. Once I was tempted to read them to my grandchildren, but they have HUNDREDS of books that sing, smell, sprout different textures, colors, talking pictures, pop ups and outs, batteries, and other stuff. My old books have dull cardboard covers, few if any illustrations, and no charming Dr. Seuss doggerel to lure a child plugged into the electronic world.

But I digress. I know, quelle shock.

The point is, when I opened a book, I read it from start to finish, guggle to zatch, and heaven help anyone who got in my way. Homework? Sure, I did it--in study hall. Sometimes. And sometimes I raced through homework while still in math class (English was easy—mostly reading) so that I could read in study hall. Housework? Did you know you can run a vacuum and read? (Is this where Jayne's dust bunnies came from?) Cook, too, but you burn a lot of food. The only thing that dragged me away from reading was riding horses, which I did pretty much all the time from fourth grade to sophomore in high school.

Oops, another digression. Sorry about that.

Anyway, I was your ordinary book junkie—if it was between covers and labeled fiction, I read it. If it was between covers and labeled non-fiction, I read it if it was about an aspect of the natural world that interested me. I read beginning, middle, end, and sighed with regret when it was over.

And sometimes, sometimes, I sighed with relief.

Sometimes the books I looked forward to so eagerly disappointed me.

I slogged on anyway, like the kid on Christmas morning whose stocking was overflowing with horse manure, and he was smiling and digging through it like crazy because with all that manure surely there must be a pony in there.

Well, I’ve emptied many a stocking as it were and haven’t found a pony yet.

So somewhere in my fourth decade, I gave myself permission not to empty the stocking down to the last turd.

If a book didn’t keep my interest, I put it down and walked away from it. At first I gave myself a few weeks, read other books, and tried the original book again. Still no flash, no sizzle. So I trust myself now to know when an author/title just isn’t to my taste. I don't even feel guilty about it.

So where do you stand/sit/recline on the subject? When you open a book, do you commit to read it all, even when you’re not particularly enjoying it? Or do you walk away to try again another day? Or do you just walk away?

(And please, no names of authors/books that disappointed you. We all know that taste is just that—taste. As individual as a fingerprint. An author I walk away from, the next reader rhapsodizes about.)




PS: Lori—I tried to use that lovely signature. And tried. *thinks about kidnapping Frank to make sig work*