There’s a good case to be made for not bothering to wade through difficult fiction, and for me that comes when I’ve lost faith in the author. An unenjoyed book can put you off reading for a long while, whereas a stint of good reading only makes you want to read more.
On the other hand, sometimes you feel obliged to get through books you don’t care for; one of them’s when you have to read for school. The worst personal example I have of required reading is A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man. Years later when I joined a book club, a previous designated book had been that one. My fellow book clubbers speak of it in equally unglowing terms, but at least they didn’t have to write a damn essay on it. For that I had to read the damn thing twice. (That’s the book that made me change majors to linguistics rather than the Emperor’s-New-Clothes of English literature.)
Then there are times in your personal reading life when you know you’re reading a good book and that you’d be better off in some nebulous way for having read it, but although you can see it’s good, you just aren’t concentrating on it.
Huckleberry Finn, Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man have fallen into that camp for me recently. What to do when a book looks set to give you up rather than the other way round?
1. Write notes as you read and use them as book marks. I tend to write notes on fiction with a large cast of characters. Doesn’t matter how messy they are — the point of writing them is not to keep the paper but to keep the mind organised. You can write notes on a bunch of different things. Maybe on plot points — whatever seems most challenging about the work.
2. Read aloud. Reading aloud is tiring. So I sometimes read the first sentence of each paragraph aloud, then skim the rest of the paragraph until I get back into the story. Not good for public transport and quiet libraries.
3. Get onto Goodreads or Sparksnotes. This spoilers the plot. That’s the downside, but chances are you weren’t really gripped by the plot if you’ve got to this stage. You might remember a couple of years ago some study about how spoilers can increase your enjoyment of a work of fiction. I find spoilers necessary if I’ve just waded through five chapters with eyes-glazed-over and can’t face going back to find out what I didn’t absorb. Internet plot summaries tend to be chronological and you can always read only as far as you’re supposed to have got.
