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.
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