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So … you’re halfway through a book and you’re hating it. It’s boring. It’s trite. It’s badly written. But … you’ve invested all this time to reading the first half.
What do you do? Read the second half? Just to finish out the story? Find out what happens?
Or, cut your losses and dump the second half?
The question actually makes it too easy. If the book is “boring,” “trite” and “badly written,” the decision to dump it is easy. In fact, I would be surprised if I lasted long enough to be halfway through.
The tougher question is one I’ve faced with a couple books recently. It’s not that they’re horrible. Instead, they just don’t really grab you and you’re looking at the stack of TBR books that are so enticing. The decision to bail is far more difficult because hope springs eternal that maybe things will get better. Yet my experience tells me that is true maybe a quarter of the time, at best.
The way a book is read — which is to say, the qualities a reader brings to a book — can have as much to do with its worth as anything the author puts into it.
Norman Cousins, Saturday Review magazine (1969)
Everyone probably has a couple self-acknowledged oddities or failings we wonder if anyone else shares. It’s always a relief to find out that other people are in the same boat. So while plenty of people have been talking about Reading in a Digital Age by Sven Birkerts in the latest issue of The American Scholar, what struck me most may not have been as significant to many other people.
See, I’ve got this thing about memory. I’m always amazed at the stuff other people remember that may, at best, barely ring a bell in my mind. So the following paragraph of the essay really grabbed me:
Effects and impacts [of a novel] change constantly, and there’s no telling what, if anything, I will find myself preserving a year from now. But even now, with the scenes and characters still available to ready recall, I can see how certain things start to fade and others leave their mark. The process of this tells on me as a reader, no question. With [a recently finished] novel—and for me this is almost always true with fiction—the details of plot fall away first, and so rapidly that in a few months’ time I will only have the most general précis left. I will find myself getting nervous in party conversations if the book is mentioned, my sensible worry being that if I can’t remember what happened in a novel, how it ended, can I say in good conscience that I have read it? Indeed, if I invoke plot memory as my stricture, then I have to confess that I’ve read almost nothing at all, never mind these decades of turning pages.
I couldn’t count the number of times a minor sense of panic has set in when someone asks me about a book I’ve read. Even if it hasn’t been years ago, I often have a hard time recalling plots, character names and, like Birkerts, sometimes even how a book ended. It just doesn’t take long at all for even significant details to evaporate from my brain cells. So when someone like Birkerts, who isn’t that much older than me, “confesses” to the same experience, I delightedly thought, “I’m not the only one!”
Yet even my parochial pleasure relates to one of the main themes in the essay. Birkerts is certain that “reading has done a great deal for me even if I cannot account for most of it” and that he knows “a great deal without knowing what I know.” I often feel the same. I may not be able to tap into a particular memory or a particular book for the source of something I know or believe, but that doesn’t mean the book left no trace of having been read. Perhaps this situation exists because of the number of books we read and the fact our brain has to shove other stuff aside as we assimilate the new. Regardless, it’s reassuring to see that even though a “lifetime of reading … maps closely to a lifetime of forgetting” I’m not alone in knowing the utter enjoyment and benefits of reading are more important than whether my memory cells are faulty.
Memory is slush, a muddy puddle in which the little ships of things now sink, now surface triumphantly.
Dorota Masloska, “Faraway, So Gross,” The Wall in My Head
There are events in everyone’s life that affect our views and attitudes even if we are not personally or even indirectly involved. One of the events that impacted the course and development of my political views happened 40 years ago today — the shootings at Kent State by the Ohio National Guard that left four students dead.
My political ideology, such as it is, is heavily influenced by the era in which I grew up. In my pre-teen years, a school program hooked me up with a pen pal in the Marines in Vietnam. The letters and photos he sent stopped after about a year and he no longer responded to my letters. Rather than making it back home to Chicago, he was killed in Quang Nam province on February 6, 1968, during the Tet Offensive. While I have among the world’s worst memory capacity, I know that because I remember his name to this day and made a special point of finding it on the Vietnam War Memorial.
It wasn’t that much later that I was watching the chaos of the 1968 Democratic Convention on TV. Even a 12-year-old kid had to wonder what was going on and what Vietnam was doing to Americans and America. Add in what else was happening in the nation over the next couple years and some of the music I would stay up late to listen to and I was on the path to a fairly committed left wing political ideology.
Had Kent State never happened, it’s likely I would have stayed on that path. Still, to this day I remain shocked, sad and disheartened by what happened there 40 years ago today. A kid can understand a soldier getting killed in a war. It’s also easy for a kid in a lily white state to wonder if there’s some political propaganda when the Black Panthers claim the cops are killing them. Blame for the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy could be laid at the feet of a couple lone wacko gunmen. But when the government starts shooting college kids protesting the Vietnam War, the bridge I was crossing seemed to be in flames behind me. I don’t know that I ever looked back again. The disclosures of the coming years — the Pentagon Papers, COINTELPRO, Watergate and Nixon’s “enemies list,” to name a few — gave me little reason to.
Granted, any loss of innocence to which Kent State contributed is far less than what those involved suffered. Still, it deepened the chasm between what I had been taught America was about and what was happening in the world. America wasn’t supposed to kill citizens who disagreed with the government. Now some of my views may have stemmed from being naive, but I’m proud to say some of that naiveté remains, along with a strong anti-authoritarian streak to which these events contributed.
To this day, thinking of May 4, 1970, brings back both sorrow and anger. There is no doubt it always will.
What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
Neil Young, “Ohio”
Last December 1, blogs were explicitly brought within the scope of updated Federal Trade Commission guidelines on rules governing the use of endorsements and testimonials in advertising. The FTC last month quietly posted on its web site the “closing letter” of its first investigation involving blogs under the rules.
The FTC investigated whether the Ann Taylor Stores Corp. violated the law in connection with providing gifts to bloggers who the company expected would post about the company’s LOFT division. In its April 20 closing letter, the FTC staff said it had decided “not to recommend enforcement action at this time.”
The investigation stemmed from LOFT providing gifts to bloggers who attended a January 26 “Exclusive Blogger Preview!” of LOFT’s Summer 2010 collection. The invitation said bloggers attending would receive a special gift and be entered in a “mystery gift card drawing.” In smaller print, the invitation said any blog coverage had to appear within 24 hours and links had to be sent to LOFT to be eligible for gift cards ranging from $10 to $500. The FTC guidelines require bloggers who receive a free or discounted product or service in exchange for writing a review to disclose that fact.
According to reports, 31 bloggers attended the event and all received gift cards. According to the FTC, only a very small number of bloggers posted anything about the preview, and several of them disclosed that LOFT had provided them gifts. Also working in LOFT’s favor was that it adopted a written policy after the event that it will not issue gifts to any blogger without first telling the blogger they must disclose the gift on his or her blog. “The FTC staff expects that LOFT will both honor that written policy and take reasonable steps to monitor bloggers’ compliance with the obligation to disclose gifts they receive from LOFT,” the closing letter said.
In typical government fashion, the letter noted that the decision not to take further steps “is not to be construed as a determination that a violation may not have occurred, just as the pendency of an investigation should not be construed as a determination that a violation has occurred.” In other words, we’re not saying you did or didn’t violate the law but we’re watching you.
This is the first public disclosure of an investigation involving bloggers under the updated guidelines. Undoubtedly, it stemmed in part from mainstream and fashion press coverage before and after the event. Some of the coverage directly asked whether this violated the new regulations, almost inviting the FTC to investigate. Yet the letter also appears to support the FTC’s statement before the updated guidelines were adopted that it would pursue the advertisers, not individual bloggers.
Frankly, then, the closing letter shouldn’t prompt a new round of uproar in the blogging community. Still, the fact there was an investigation and a public letter on it indicates that blogs are on the FTC’s radar and that bloggers need to be cognizant of that fact. Moreover, corporations who see social media as a vehicle for advertising and endorsements better be putting policies in place and making sure they are following the regulations.
One size does not fit all in any regulation.
Bruce Aust, Inc. magazine, (September 2005)
Given that in the last six weeks or so I returned four Bibliolust books to the library unread because I couldn’t get to them before they were due back, this is the second month in a row the lust list is short. In fact, two of the books on this month’s list don’t come out until June. I did, though, buy one of the Bibliolust books returned to the library and have two of them on hold again.
Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline, Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton — How can I resist a book described as “the first comprehensive history of graphic representations of time in Europe and the United States from 1450 to the present,” particularly when several people have already described it as “the most beautiful book of the year”? This may well be one you spend more time lingering over the pictures and art than reading.
The Passage, Justin Cronin — The hype and buzz on this book started weeks ago, even though it isn’t set to come out until June 8. Throw in the fact it’s a post-apocalyptic novel clocking in at more than 750 pages, the amount of talk it’s already generated dictated it be on my list. So I’ve already got a reserve on it at the library — which means I will undoubtedly face the task of getting it read in 14 days.
Record Store Days: From Vinyl to Digital and Back Again, Gary Calamar — One of the first jobs I had as a teenager was filling in for the owner of the local record shop during the summer when he wanted to take off early for a weekend or for vacation. The number of vinyl LPs I still own remains a testament to that so a book on record stores borders on irresistible.
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, David Mitchell — Like many, I was bowled over by Mitchell’s 2004 novel, Cloud Atlas. His most recent novel isn’t slated for release until the end of June and isn’t in the same vein (if anything could be) but it’s still getting early raves, including suggestions of it winning the Booker Prize. Ergo, I lust.
Report Card:
Year-to-date (January-April)
- Total Bibliolust books: 21
- Number read: 8 (38%)
- Started but did not finish: 2 (9.5%)
Cumulative (September 2008-April2009)
- Total Bibliolust books: 107
- Number read: 66 (61.7%)
- Started but did not finish: 5 (4.7%)
“Lord!” he said, “when you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue — you sell him a whole new life.”
Christopher Morley, Parnassus on Wheels
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