R.I.P., Somebody the Sailor

I hate giving up on books. Oh, sure, I always say “Life is too short to read bad books,” and I quote Nancy Pearl’s Rule of 50 whenever anyone else is struggling through a book she doesn’t want to read, but the truth is I almost always force myself through a book I’m not really enjoying. I’ve already invested time in it, and I don’t want that time to have been wasted. In some ways, I’m an optimist, and I convince myself that it will get better. And I’m also a bit obsessive, and since I’ve already logged the book in my spreadsheet, I’m committed to it. But after several days of book avoidance, some of my lovely, enabling friends convinced me to give up on John Barth’s The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor.

I immediately felt lighter! Just knowing I wasn’t going to have to pick that book up again made me walk home faster. And then, when I got home, an envelope from Picador was in the mail–a LibraryThing Early Reviewers book. Clearly, this was fate. And so I opened the envelope and started to read. And even though it wasn’t a great book, I read it with a happy heart. Will I learn from this experience? That’s tough to say right now. But I think back on some of my time wasters of the last couple of years (particularly Clare Clark’s The Great Stink, which truly stunk) and wish I’d learned the lesson already.