I’m currently reading two books that I’m struggling with. The first is East of Eden by John Steinbeck. I was required to read The Grapes of Wrath back in high school; didn’t like it. It was slow and dusty and dry. Still the creepiest ending of all time. Never thought I’d pick up another book by him, but now a book club that I’m participating in with some college friends is reading for the next two months, so here I am reading Steinbeck again. I expected it to be a slog, and it is, but it’s a classic and it’s an experience to put back on my English major hat.
The other book is A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge. I hadn’t expected this to be a slog, I have positive memories of the previous book, A Fire Upon the Deep, but now that I’m deep into this second one, I’m remembering that book was also a little dense. Something about Vinge’s writing style makes getting through the words hard, even though I like what’s going on. I think it’s maybe the world building style he has? I think he has an allergy to info dumps and therefore I feel very lost a lot of the time. Sometimes I’m five or ten minutes into a chapter before I figure out that we’ve switched characters and I don’t know where we are. Also, it turns out to be not a sequel but a prequel about one specific character, so I’m not getting more wolf aliens, which is a bummer.
Giving up on books that aren’t right for you (right now, or even ever) is a totally okay thing to do. I’ve been getting better at this. But what do you do when you have a book you really want to read but you’re struggling to make it through the words? I really want to finish both these books, so I’ve been working on ideas. A couple of tips I’m using:
* Discuss it with other people. The book club that’s reading East of Eden had a midway check-in last week. (I was only 1/3 in, but whatever.) I was so glad to find that there were other people in the group struggling with the book. We were able to pin down a few things that make it hard to read (lots of telling, not showing; difficult to believe/like characters), which is very cathartic. But we also talked about why we still wanted to keep going in spite of that. Did you know that East of Eden sold 50,000 copies last year? (How many of those were people assigned to read it? Not clear.) We talked about the symbolism behind the characters we struggled with, which made them a lot easier to understand. I left feeling encouraged to continue with the book.
* If you don’t have someone to read it with in real life, try looking up critical conversations about the book. Even just reading the Wikipedia article about East of Eden helped me know what a big influence this book really has been on our culture and what Steinbeck was trying to accomplish. Some books might not be for you, but are important enough influences that you want to struggle through them anyway. Doing some research can help you decide whether continuing is worth it, and also help you know what to look for when you’re reading, which can make it more interesting.
* Play the percentages game. This is a trick I learned from long distance running. One of the main preoccupations that keeps me going on a 12 mile long slog is figuring out exactly how much distance I have left. I am constantly calculating what fraction of the way there I am, or exactly how much longer I have. Likewise, both these books are due back at the library soon, so I’ve calculated what percentage of the book I need to read each day to finish on time. I don’t always meet my reading goal for the day, but seeing that percentage on my Kindle or the hours on my audiobook tick slowly down gives me some of the satisfaction that I am not currently getting from the plot line.
Do you push through books that you don’t enjoy reading? Or do you just put them down? Theoretically, I’m in favor of reading difficult books, but I have a hard time actually doing it, especially when the difficulty is in the prose not the plot.
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In other news, yesterday I saw this call for papers on Mormonism and Science Fiction on Facebook and got super excited. I got even more excited when I scrolled through the resources and found my recent series of blog posts listed on there with Michael Colling’s stuff that I read back in college when I wrote the initial paper. This is what it looks like when the internet works! You send stuff out into the void on the tiny niche of things you love, and then you discover that there are other people out there who are interested in this thing. Anyway, I’m really excited to start developing some ideas for this call. In fact, I don’t know how I’m going to narrow down my ideas. (Now my problem is figuring out how I’m going to get back into the BYU library while I’m down there, since there’s a lot of this stuff that isn’t available online.)
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Also, is anyone else devastated that the original creators have left the Avatar: The Last Airbender live-action remake on Netflix? I just can’t imagine this going anywhere good, and Avatar deserves better. I’m also dying of curiosity to find out what the disagreement was about. Ah well.