Obligations

[ladysprite]

While I love finding new authors and broadening my literary collection, it's always a prospect that worries me just a little, because for some reason that I don't quite understand I tend to feel obligated to finish any book that I start.

It doesn't matter whether it's a gem of prose or the worst drivel I've ever run across; no matter how much I might want to put it down and wander back into the arms of my steadfast favorites, I feel like I'm a bad person if I quit a book halfway through. I'm not sure why - I don't feel the same obligation with a bad meal, or a dull movie, or almost any form of art. But with books, it seems to me that I've made a commitment by starting one, and that I owe it to the book and the author to tough it through to the last page.

I'm getting better. It used to be that I felt obliged to finish an entire series when I started the first book, but Laurell K. Hamilton and Robert Jordan have quite efficiently cured me of that need. Still, once or twice a year I wind up plodding page by page through some book that I probably should have known better than to pick up in the first place, wishing that I had the willpower or callousness or whatever to just let it go. I like to fancy that this makes me a stronger, more dedicated, morally superior individual, but I have a sneaking suspicion that all it honestly makes me is bored.

This post is brought to you, incidentally, by 'Eragon.' Yeah, it's a sensation. And I suppose it's better than the novel I wrote in the back of my trig notes when I was fifteen, but not by much. If anyone out there can tell me that it gets better somewhere past page 50, I would be eternally grateful.....

Comments

[lensedqso.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I found Eragon to be some of the most boring and average and just plain dull stuff I've read in a long long time. I zoned out about halfway through as a sort of unintentional anasthesia against the boredom and don't even remember the second half of the book although I did finish it.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

It does not.

I expect the Prince of Lies to be claiming this kid's soul any day now...

[dagibbs.livejournal.com]

I still feel that obligation, that obligation to complete books I've started. I've gotten WAY better at just putting the book aside and starting something else. See, that way, I haven't given up...I'll just get back to it "later", then I allow later to...stretch... and eventually it never happens.

[vettecat.livejournal.com]

As an antidote, I recommend some Bujold... :-)

[jducoeur]

If it's any comfort, I do the same thing much more expensively with comic books. Once I start into a storyline, it's astonishingly hard for me to drop it. And at an average of something like $2.50 a month for stories that can drag on for years, that can be an expensively bad habit...

(Also if it's any comfort, I've been learning to suppress it. It's taken years, and it still requires a willpower roll, but I've found that sufficient pain can sometimes nowadays get me to drop a story in the middle...)

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

I sometimes have that problem. Last time, I cured it by asking someone who'd read the book if I had correctly pegged the "surprise twist ending". In fact, the ending was even less subtle than I had expected, so I felt no further need to actually read up to it :-)