AutoTopic: Do You Feel Obligated To Finish All Books You Start Reading?

I liked this AutoTopicGenerator suggestion because it is right up my alley.  I love to read, and am generally happy with anything between the back of the cereal box to some pretty far-out stuff, both fiction and nonfiction. Obviously that statement speaks to my tinker-toy approach to an engineering world, but that’s not addressing the topic.

The short answer is:  YES, dammit!  The why (not asked, technically, but pretty important nonetheless) is not a True/False or Multiple Guess answer.  Yes, I know, I hated story problems and essay questions too.  Who would have thought I’d wind up doing a blog?  Again, I digress…

Of course it is important to finish a book once you start!  And never, never dog-ear the pages!  What do you think bookmarks are for?  Anyway, I’d suggest that if you put one down then you are insulting the poor schmuck who spent all that time and effort creating it.  I mean really, why in the hell did you buy the book in the first place?  Don’t get me wrong, because I’m not laying this out as an absolute standard here.  I’ve picked up a couple of works by British academics that even my dull mind couldn’t successfully bludgeon into submission.  In this use case, we find our corollary rule:  One is allowed to abandon the book if the author has made it bamboo-under-your-nails painful to read.

I think an additional note here is also important, and this is purely personal.  By whatever combination of genes, nurturing, and self-elected life direction, I am what you could call a “Type 5-A” personality, with borderline OCD issues.  So given that it should come as no surprise that I will plug along through some of the most dense and obtuse shit out there in the literary world before even acknowledging a tie, let alone defeat.  I can recall two books in 42 years I’ve set down, never to return to, and said, “Dear Lord, either fix that poor jackwagon or snatch him up now, because he can’t write!” In order to avoid this statistic from climbing, I generally avoid Shakespeare. Someone needs to revise his shit into more modern English, sorry.

I currently have several works “in progress” on my shelves, notably the copy of The Iliad that my sister gave me.  In this example, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m waiting for my brain to mature to the point where I can exercise enough patience to finish that work. I also blame the translator.

Jury is still out on that possibility (the mature brain part, not the book being finished part).