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When you stop reading a "great" book

Good Substack article by Joel Miller on ditching a book considered "great" when it's not working for you.   https://www.millersbookreview.com/p/i-quit-one-of-literatures-greatest-novels-questions-for-when-a-book-just-doesnt-work-for-you?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=564548&post_id=210823622&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=2pwl1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Finishing [a book] is a strange concept to begin with if you pause and think about it. Do we ever finish a book? What does that mean? Think Augustine’s Confessions or Montaigne’s Essays, Middlemarch, and The Brothers Karamazov. Do you finish the Bible? Books are tools for thinking and feeling, sometimes praying and other deeper movements of the soul. Do we complete that just because the pages end? Is reaching the end the end? And to pick up the word’s other meaning, is it even the point? 

He is talking specifically about Tristam Shandy, which I have no interest in reading but is considered great. I have no problem with putting a book aside for . . . as long as I feel like it. I am asked to read a lot of books by fellow writers and in preparation for podcast interviews (see Dialogues with Creators--you're missing it if you don't listen, ha, ha). Some I end up skimming, some engage me, some I set aside, especially memoirs that start to feel too self-absorbed, or in the case of Liars' Club, way too depressing and also hard to believe (i.e., that she could remember all that from when she was seven). 

But the ones he mentions in the quotes? I read the Bible every day, some days more, some days less, but it's not "newspaper" reading, it's close reading. Try the book of Esther, which I'm studying with a small group at church to "help" the pastor prepare for the sermon. I'll do another post on that, but a close reading benefits one with humor, code switching, irony, and great quotable lines that imprint on one's soul. And I am not even sure of its canonicity! (Sorry, that's an overstatement. Who am I to decide on the canonicity of a 2300-2400 years old book?

I need to reread Augustine, have read The Karamazov Boys two or three times and will again, and am in the well, middle of Middlemarch. It's slow going sometimes, like driving through mountains on the way to the "plains." All of the sudden a vista opens and you're rewarded with humor, insight, good dialogue, and something actually happening. Montaigne, well, I think I read one of them in a World Lit class 50 years ago. 

Like Miller, I could read all day, but . . . I have family, a body that needs exercise, a dog that needs walking, community commitments, etc.   But I do spend too much time on YouTube videos. . . 

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