Month: November 2015

For the second consecutive month, my book group is reading a title I would never read on my own. This time it’s a modern romance; last month it was a lurid murder story. Both books are by best-selling authors.

The member who chose the murder story said she wanted a quick read during the busy holiday season. I don’t know the motivation of the person who chose the romance, but I would bet she had a similar reason. Maybe a quick read, maybe something easy on the holiday-harried intellect.

I cannot identify with the impulse to choose a mindless read.

I remember the time a friend posted a request on Facebook asking for recommendations for an easy-going beach read for her vacation. The suggestions ran one extreme to the other, perhaps inadvertently because of me.

It started with the highbrow. She was a university employee, and many suggestions were made to impress her, I thought: heavy tomes that would be very difficult to tackle while lolling around on a sandy towel under the burning sun. I picked a Miami-based crime novel by a former journalist — not high literature by any stretch, but intelligently written and containing wry humor and some insights about the state of newspapers as voiced by the protagonist, a reporter whose career is on the downswing.

Apparently I lowered the bar way too much. On the heels of my proposed title came a suggestion for what was termed a “mindless” read. In fact, I suspected the word came in response to my title, as if to say, well, if we’re getting off our high horse to go there, then by all means let’s do mindless and call it what it is. I think the person suggested something on the order of these latest titles chosen by my book group.

But I take issue with mindless reading — the practice and the attitude behind it.

As a reader, I choose how much of myself to put into a book. If I’m busy or distracted or time-constrained, I might read it lightly — sort of intellectually skimming the text — but I can also choose at any time to give the book my full, deep attention. I might mark up the margins with notes, I might read a passage out loud to my husband, I might write a reflection or two in my journal. I don’t have to do any of this, but I can, because I choose books that give me something in exchange for my time.

I don’t want the book to decide for me how deeply I should read. That’s what these murder stories and romances do: They are the equivalent of bad TV, mind-numbing pabulum that serves only to kill time.

If I want to kill time, I can turn on the TV. If I want to invest my time in a book, it’s not to numb my mind. In fact, I turn to books when I feel my mind going numb watching TV. The books I choose wake me up. I read to make myself feel or think something. If a book is too much like TV, I’ll turn to a better book!

 

 

 

 

A few days ago I closed a book after reading the first 30 pages and decided not to pick it up again. This was a big decision for me. The last time I decided not to finish a book, many months ago, was probably the first time too.

Until now, I’ve always approached books and the finishing of them as I do a plate of dinner: You must finish your plate because it’s a sin to waste food. I was many years into adulthood before I made peace with the idea of throwing away uneaten food. And perhaps that experience sheds light on how I’ve finally made peace with not finishing a book.

In the case of food, I learned long ago to be careful at buffets: Choose wisely and dot your plate with a teaspoon of this and a bite of that, so your plate looks like a crazy tray of hors d’oeuvre. I’m a pretty adventurous eater, so it’s no big deal if I don’t like everything I taste. But that doesn’t mean I want to eat or waste a big helping of it. After sampling everything, I go back for seconds of the things I liked. Easy.

But then there’s the restaurant experience. I’ve ordered foods naively assuming the worst they could be was mediocre, only to discover some dishes were so bad I literally could not put any more than a few bites in my mouth. I could write 750 words just on the three gumbo experiences I’ve had in Wyoming, Michigan and Arkansas that ultimately contributed to my détente with food waste.

Let’s cut to the third of that shameful triad: Arkansas, where the gumbo was black as ink and bore the extremely heavy taste of … I guessed pure Liquid Smoke. After the first revolting spoonful, I took to sifting through the bowl with a fork to pick up the rice and let the inky broth drain. It left black silt on the rice, and of course, that flavor. After a while I got angry and indignant and I put my fork down. How dare the kitchen even serve this swill? When the waitress offered to bring me something else, I declined. Clearly the kitchen would only waste whatever food it handled.

And there was the key to my dilemma: It was not I who wasted food, it was the restaurant cook whose abuse of innocent foodstuffs was so extreme as to be a sin! By throwing it away, I was merely laying those mutilated remains to rest instead of humiliating them further by tasting them with curled lip.

Since that Arkansas gumbo experience, I have thrown away partial plates of food whenever I was confident it was the kitchen and not me who sinned.

And now, I see an analogous situation in choosing whether to read and savor a book all the way through or to put it down after a fair tasting and cleanse my palate with something better.

I belong to a book group, and we take turns choosing a book once a month as well as a place to discuss it over margaritas and dinner. Our choices are all over the board, as are our members. Although I haven’t liked all of the choices, I’ve finished every one of them since joining the group, probably because of some residual clean-your-plate ethic.

But this book is like that terrible gumbo.

The author doesn’t need or deserve any publicity from me; let’s just say he churns out bestsellers that bear his name at the top and a co-author’s credit at the bottom. Most are destined for movies, and they typically involve a murder story narrated in three-page chapters.

His work reminds me of the many TV series I switch off before the opening credits. I simply can’t stomach those crime shows that open with some woman being kidnapped, then return after the opening credits to detail exactly how she was raped and tortured before being killed by a serial pervert who’s still on the loose.

After a brief prologue, the narrative of this book jumps right into the victim’s kidnap and on to her explicitly described bondage, rape, torture and finally her murder — all filmed for a paying customer. When I put the book down, it was with the same indignation I felt when I put down my fork. The author and his cohort have done to words what that Arkansas restaurant cook did to food — made it into garbage. I cannot and will not swallow another bite.