I’ve just come up against a drawback of setting an ambitious books-read goal for myself: it means I can’t abandon a book that’s not really doing it for me.
I mean, if I were to hate a book in the first ten pages, I could put it down and pick up another without too much sturm und drang. But if I’m a third of the way through before I realize hey, this isn’t my cup of tea, it’s not really grabbing me — well, now I’m too invested. I’ve spent too much time on it and if I stop reading now, I won’t get to add it to my tally and I will have wasted the time I’ve already put in reading it.
I find myself in that situation now with Incarceron, the next young adult title I picked up after finishing the excellent Will Grayson, Will Grayson. I knew it was dystopian fantasy, somewhat in the Hunger Games style (I did love that series). It isn’t my usual genre, but what the heck.
Well…it isn’t terrible and i don’t hate it, it’s just not really blowing my skirt up, you know what I mean? But I’m almost 200 pages in, I’ve put in a good four or five hours’ reading time, and dammit now I have to finish it. I might not do so if it weren’t for The Project.
I may finish it and find that I’m glad I did, or I might just begrudge that reading time in perpetuity. Only another 300 pages will tell for sure.
The Roth Project 2011 