I’m reading Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer. I picked it up at a used book sale because the title sounded familiar in the sense that I had heard good things about this book. (Don’t ask me when or from whom I heard these good reviews...something in my mind said, “Go for it. Get the book.” For two dollars, I had nothing to lose.) I’m about half way through it, and I love bits of the story, but I wonder if I want to finish the book.
The structure is really interesting, that’s one thing that keeps me reading. The author is himself in the story (or maybe a character of himself, I’m not sure) who goes to Ukraine to find his ancestors’ home village and thank the woman who helped his distant relatives escape the Nazis. Jonathan (the author) meets up with an interpreter/translator named Alex. Some of the chapters are Jonathan recounting parts of his relatives’ lives in Ukraine, passages of his family history. Other chapters are Alex’s translations into (broken/awkward) English about the trip he and Jonathan take to research the family, and the rest are letters that Alex writes to Jonathan about the progress of the book they’re working on together (aka the book I’m reading). The story is about writing the book, which reminds me of One Thousand Years of Solitude and that’s all well and good.
Jonathan’s writing is beautiful and touching at times, and it’s fun to read Alex’s translations...his word usage isn’t correct all the time but I still understand everything he’s saying. But I’m bored with the characters.
My favorite character in the book so far is Jonathan’s great-great-great-(great?)-grandfather, Yankel. But Yankel died (of old age, nothing surprising) and now I’m left with this handful of characters I mostly don’t care about and find interesting only some of the time.
And my question is, am I wasting my time if I read the rest of the story?
The thing about school and college was, we had to read novels through to the end (or Sparknote them, whatever. I felt bad shrugging off the work so I always read the novel). I had a reason, a necessity to read books through to the end, even if I didn’t like them. I don’t have to do that anymore. If I’m reading for myself, should I force myself to keep reading a story I don’t like?
With movies, I have a rule. If I’m watching a movie and I don’t like it after twenty minutes, it’s okay to turn it off. I give the film it’s fair chance and if it’s not something I want to watch, I don’t have to waste time watching the rest of it. Move on and it’s fine. I don’t have a rule like that with books that I stick to. I’ve said I’ll give a book one hundred pages to interest me. I think that’s fair. I was reading Dune by Frank Herbert, and that’s what I did, put it away after one hundred pages. I liked the story but it was going so slowly. I trudged through the first hundred or so pages and I didn’t feel like forcing myself to read hundreds more. I feel bad because it’s supposedly one of the greatest science fiction novels ever, but I was falling asleep in the middle of chapters, the way I used to fall asleep reading history textbooks. I don’t see the point in doing that if I don’t have to.
And then there’s C.S. Lewis. In Mere Christianity, he says, “It is a very silly idea that in reading a book you must never ‘skip.’ All sensible people skip freely when they come to a chapter which they find is going to be of no use to them.” (Yes, I bothered looking up the quote.) I understand what he means if he’s talking about non-fiction. If I’m reading a book about ancient Egyptians, I can skip the chapter on government structure if I’m interested in religious rituals. But I don’t see how I can skip around the same way in novels. Surely I’d miss things in the story that would relate to later chapters that I would be reading. I might skim over passages or skip halfway down a page. But whole chapters? I don’t see how I could do that and still know what’s happening in the story.
So then I’m stuck. Do I keep reading Everything Is Illuminated? The other difficulty is, I have a stack of books on my shelf, waiting to be read. I’m interested in some of those more than what I’m reading now, but I don’t like reading more than one book at a time. Invariably, I ignore the book I like less and it’s like I’m reading one book at a time anyway. I guess I will keep reading and hope that the second half is better than the first half. Maybe I’ll skip a passage here and there.
It’s times like these when I wish I had special alien powers like Allen Strange. (I wonder who else remembers that show.) He could flip through a book once and read it that fast, as he was flipping the pages. I could get through a hundred pages in a few seconds and be done with this book. It’s not about reading, it’s about time.
In another sense of abandoning books...I’ve been considering getting an e-book reader. I like the convenience of having access to so many books without needing the physical space to keep them. I like that on the Kindle you can borrow e-books from public libraries. But like I said, I have a stack of printed books that will keep me busy for a while. I don’t spend that much time reading and I do live close to the library, so having access to a lot of books isn’t an issue for me.And then there’s the Printed Word Pledge. I haven’t officially signed my name to it, but I do feel bad about making the switch to digital books, even if my reading habit would really be a hybrid of physical and digital books. I’m talking around in circles again, it happens.