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Do you ever force yourself to read something? Maybe it's that book that your book club chose that you just do not want to read. Or a something a teacher or professor assigned. Or, if you are like me, it's probably of your own making. I'll be the first to say that I hate assigned reading, but I can't deny that sometimes there is value in it too.
Now, I've made it no secret that I dislike required reading, and that I'm a big fan of being able to read what you like. I think that most people end up loathing at least some of the books they had to read in high school. While I'm fond of books and people who like books, I don't do the book club thing, because reading books I didn't choose -- and reading them on a schedule -- just isn't particularly fun for me. Sometimes I really like the conversations that result from a bunch of people having read the same book, and other times the conversation just sounds like Charlie Brown's teacher to me (wah wah woh wah wah).
So maybe it's a bit odd that sometimes I will force a book upon myself. There are many books each year that I start and do not finish. The reasons I don't finish them range from running out of time before they are due back at the library (and I can't renew for some reason) to me getting distracted by something shiny. It's rarely because I don't like the book and more that for whatever reason it is simply not the right time for me to read it. There are books that I will start half a dozen times that just don't stick. Eventually that book will start to weigh on me. In my mind it becomes The Book That I Have Not Read and because I build it up in my mind it becomes a big deal to me that I haven't finished it.
Let's look at an example: The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. I could still tell you where I bought that book and how disappointed I was that I did not really like it when I tried it. It was supposed to be a relaxing read for me. I started that book at least half a dozen times. I gave away my copy convinced I would never read it. It became a thing, a running joke even. Then I challenged a friend, who had also never finished it, to read it and the next thing I knew there was a whole group of us doing it. I got a copy from the library and I swore as I read my way through it. I still refer to it as "The Stupid Moonstone." I didn't like it...but you know what? I kind of love not liking it. It's a book that I finished and I complain about a lot but that's part of the fun of it. It's a fun book to hate because I had fun reading and complaining about it with my friends. In fact, someday I highly suspect that I'm going to re-read it so I can hate it all over again. (Look, I never claimed to be normal.)
There's been a book hanging over me for years, and I put reading it on my list of reading goals for 2010. It was a book I really did want to read, but try as I might, I could never get more than a chapter or two into it: Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. I had lost track of how many times I had started that book. I mentioned it to someone, who told me maybe Dickens wasn't for me. That ruffled my feathers a bit, because I rather like Dickens. No, it just had never been the right time -- and I was going to make it the right time.
A few weeks ago, I saw my opportunity. It was the weekend for the spring edition of Dewey's 24 Hour Read-A-Thon. In the past, I've used the read-a-thon as a chance to catch up on my teetering pile of books that needed to be read. This time, I used it to read A Tale of Two Cities. Some people thought I was crazy. Some people thought I was brave. The truth is this is how I read best -- in big gulps. The more often I set
