Hate to get all Peter Mandelson on you, but I’ve decided I’m a fighter not a quitter. When it comes to books, that is. I hate giving up on them. No matter how dense the prose, how teakish the characters, how convoluted the structure, I have to plough on to the bitter endpage. And sometime it is bitter; you finish the book as unimpressed as you were at page 20, thinking ‘there go a few hours of my life I’ll never get back’. But often you warm to the book, feeling glad you persisted. Those are the experiences that inspire, that make you a plougher. Is it the right way to be, though?
A friend of mine has a ‘page 80’ rule. If the book hasn’t gripped him by then, off to Oxfam it goes. About half the books he starts fail the test, a recent example being The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford. ‘Some of the great Russian stuff benefited from perseverance,’ Andrew tells me. ‘But I was younger then.’ He’s in his fifties now. The awareness of how many years you’ve got left reminds me of the TV producer John Lloyd, who reacted to a shop’s entire wall of books about 5th century Athens with: ‘Shit, I’m 42, I haven’t got time to read all that!’ Lloyd did read some of them, though, which is just as well, as it was those books (and similar reading) that gave him the idea for QI.
Occasionally even I give up the literary ghost. Meeting a character called Agatha Gobble in Colin Forbes’s The Cell, I assumed the thriller was a spoof. Realising a few pages later that it was in fact just crap, I consigned it to the shelf. But more and more I’m experiencing the ‘two-thirds’ rule; until that point I struggle, then suddenly get into it, so much so that the final third accounts for only a tenth of the total reading time. In a novel this can be because the characters take a while to grow on you. With science it might be that the early stages explain a difficult principle, while the rest of the book shows the principle in action. Brian Christian (author of the brilliant The Most Human Human, about the limits of artificial intelligence) has the opposite tendency: ‘I begin enjoying books much less when I’m almost done with them,’ he writes. ‘The beginning of the book is about pleasure and exploration, the end is about follow-through and completeness, which interest me much less.’
The dream, of course, is a book that grabs you at the very beginning, whose ‘voice’ (wish there was a less pseudy word than that, but you know what I mean) is there from page one. A book like Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, or Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, or Keith Richards’s majestic (satanically majestic?) autobiography. Most of the time, though, you have to give a book some slack, put in the hard yards over the early pages. When those yards become miles, how do you respond? One solution is to take a break, read an easier book before returning to the problem one. Sometimes that works. But when I paused on Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, the book I turned to was Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now – and that proved just as boggy. (Meant in the ‘tough to get through’ sense rather than the way 7 year-olds use the word.) Both now sit, half-finished, staring at me reproachfully each time they’re leapfrogged by one of their rivals in the ‘to read’ pile. Occasionally I tackle a few pages. And I’m determined to finish them both. Though at the current rate that’ll mean finding a way of living to 200.
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