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.
Wanda Freeman 