The Art of Giving up a Book

-For the Uncensored!

As David Mitchell remarks in Cloud Atlas, “A half read book is a half-finished love-affair.”

There’s nothing more than gives me great shame than having to say I have stopped reading a certain book at some point. First of all, no one should have to read a book with incredibly small print. It’s a tragedy when a good story that you’re interested in, as for me, the Last Duel seemed like an interesting story to me. But the book by Eric Jager had five inch print. That’s sinful. But then that’s kind of a minor/major offense that can make people want to give up reading a book.

            Sometimes it’s for college and if you’re not into it, it doesn’t matter. You have to impress that hot brown girl with sandy blonde hair and razor green eyes. The fixation of a book has to have that individual appeal. A book can appeal to everyone and no one. Thomas Pynchon, to me, is an author that once you meet someone who has read all of his work, lives in that certain club. You and that soul mate must stay friends because we both have read an obsure post modernist that others won’t take the time with.

            The casual Pynchon fans are The Crying of Lot 49, and those people aren’t the real deal Pynchon fans. No one has read Gravity’s Rainbow, except me and 25 other people. The disorder of giving up a book is sad, to me. Sometimes it’s because I force myself to read a book, and after a while, I just stare at the page and lost the plot entirely. But if the plot is great, it leaves me on that page entirely, living in the authors world.