Grinding Through a Book?

Keep going or find another more promising read?

There are some books where you just keep going and reading, never seeming to get to the end. Some are worth it in the end, and some aren’t.

I’m currently reading Bolano’s Savage Detectives and the rambling, disjointed middle section has slowed my progress to a crawl, despite how much I enjoyed the first part. It makes me wonder if it’s worth continuing with when it’s become something of a grind.

I’m not scared of skimming through sections, or abandoning a book completely if I’ve had enough. There are more than enough books on my shelves to not worry about weeding out things I just haven’t gotten on well with. Some I’ll come back to, most I won’t.

The worst offender is Moby Dick, a thousand pages of nineteenth century whaling trivia with occasional digressions into a story. Having heard so much about it from so many people whose views I respect I had high expectations - not least of Ahab. Instead I found him dull, peripheral and swamped by the mountains of boredom you had to get through to find where the thread of the story had gone. A far cry from the primal and magnetic force he’d been described to me as. Moby Dick’s without doubt the worst book I’ve read in years.

The common threads in books I abandon are easy to pick up. Unsympathetic characters is often a deal breaker for me. I found the Game of Thrones books uninteresting as a result of this - I simply didn’t care what happened to a single character as they pretty much all deserved whatever fate they got. Mid-way through the second book I came to the conclusion that the entire cast spontaneously combusting would be an improvement and closed the book.

Another issue which drives me away from books is the “cast of thousands” phenomenon, especially when it’s necessary to keep track of who’s who and where they fit. A central cast, with peripheral characters, is fine but I don’t want to take notes of everyone’s names and relationships to read a book. This is exacerbated if it’s a non-chronological novel and you need to check person, relationships, time and place.

Some writers become victims of their own success, with each following novel being worse than the one before. This is particularly the case where it feels that the editor has been frightened off and a rather rambling and messy manuscript has ended up in print rather than take the risk of offending the writer. Jean Auel’s last instalments in her Earth’s Children series definitely fall under this problem, and rely solely on the affection built up in the first half of the series to get people through to the end. I’ve found some of the Monster Hunters series by John Scalzi having a similar issue - under-edited and as a result deeply lacking in a central plot to drive things onwards.

On the other hand, there are no doubt books which start slow and reward the grind through. Tolkien is something of a standard bearer for this. It’s hard for me to think of a great many books which come back to the reader, where the slog is rewarding rather than the end simply being a relief.