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Obligations
May. 24th, 2004 09:56 pmWhile 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.....
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.....
