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Finishing Books
Jan. 3rd, 2022 01:04 pmI apparently have a large TBR pile. Actually several, online in open browser tabs, on the Kindle, and in a bookcase. Except these aren't the to be reads: these are the started, part reads, stalled partways.... I don't ever give up on a book. I merely place a bookmark, or two (for which, the explanation is coming), and move on. I'll come back to it. The bookcase, the "a-reading" collection, the open tabs: these are the reading equivalent of the knitter's UFOs (unfinished objects [and don't ask me about those!]). My actual TBR pile is virtual: the Amazon wishlist, for the most part, and bookmarks of reviews in Diigo (I'll leave my username for the guessing ;-).
I don't ever give up on a book.
Last night I finished Susanna Clarke's Piranesi. I'd begun it sometime in the late summer/early autumn, put it aside, and picked it up last night an got through the remaining two thirds. Six months, maybe, elapsed time. Partly, this was the inconvenience of it being a physical copy, rather than electronic. But mostly, I just got stuck.
Or, another example, perhaps the most extreme. I was given, by a very dear friend, a copy of The White Guard by Mikael Bulgakov. It was my nineteenth birthday. Twenty years or so later, I sat down and finished it. But, at least, I finished it, the right way round.
I'd really rather finish a book than not and whilst I have the storage space and feel no guilt in having a large backlog (it does not very often call to to me like a heap of unfulfilled commitments, broken promises) there is something to be said for finishing a book before you've completely forgotten much of what you've read.
I was very careful with my wording of the end of that last sentence--"finishing a book before you've completely forgotten much of what you've read"--not saying, as I might have done "getting to the end of a book before you've completely forgotten what happened at the beginning", because I have a method that sometimes prevents a book transitioning from read in a few days to decades-long haul.
I confess, judge me as you will, that I always read the last page of a book pretty much as soon as I've read the first few pages. It's partly a habit borne of undergraduate years with a week to write an essay on a novelist or theme in the dim, dark days before the internet provided helpful summaries and full-text search to help with the speed-reading and digesting. It's also that I've found with non-fiction that I can get a good handle on a work by its index, appendices, bibliography, glossary, concluding chapter. I've written that way round, too: if the software's not done, but there are specifications, a legacy system, it's often possible to define the terms for the glossary, create some appendices, even before the meat of the text can be constructed.
I'm not, it appears, hung up on linearity. I've read many trilogies starting with book 2, or even book 3. I hop around hypertexts.
In sum, I do not feel bound to start a page 1 (or even page i: I read all the front matters [and hate how the Kindle takes me straight to the start of the main text so I have to go back to the front cover]) and read through to the end. That being said, at some point I set my eyes on the first line of the first chapter and start reading a book. Mostly, and in reasonable time, I whizz through and finally savour with more appreciation the final few paragraphs on the concluding page that were somewhat meaningless, somehow mysterious when I'd sampled them before.
Except, when I don't. I stall. I attempt to push forward. I read a page over. The next occasion I pick up the book, I re-read that page. I plough through the next, realise I've taken nothing in, read it again. Bogged down I consign the book to the shelf or leave it to sink down the list in the a-reading collection, supplanted by newer works.
When this happened with a David Brin, probably The Uplift War, I didn't put the book down. I was invested enough in the story to want to know how it got to the end. So interest was I that I went back to that last page that I'd already seen and read it again. I think the final chapter was short, so it seemed quite reasonable to read it in its entirety. And the penultimate chapter. And the ante-- After a handful of chapters, I had seen more conclusions to stories I'd hardly seen framed that I went back to the sticking place and shot through much of the remainder of the book. If I felt I was flagging, I marked my place and read another chapter back from the end, before returning to the more usual order or progress. I finished, or read all of, the book, and, I think, enjoyed it.
Several points arise from this. The first is the need, when dealing with physical volumes, for two bookmarks for any book getting this treatment. Not all do. Some just wait on the bookcase until I come back to them afresh.
The second is the interesting metric of where the two bookmarks meet. Since I always read the last page early, there's an implicit second bookmark just before the end of every book i read. So, if the start of chapter 1 is 0% and the end of the last paragraph of the final chapter is 100%, then no book I read hits 100%. Most hit as close to 100% as makes no odds. The others, the ones where the second bookmark slips back a few pages, whilst the first bookmark progresses in fits and starts, are more interesting.
Take Piranesi. I read part one with a little effort. And gave up awhile. When I restarted last night, I read maybe two or three pages into part 2 and then knew I was unlikly to go on. I reread the last page, and this was sufficiently interesting (exciting, even) that I read the final part. At the point I took the plunge and read the parts in reverse order finishing the rest of the book in a single sitting. Of course, it's not really about finishing, is it? It's about whether I enjoyed the book, which I did: I will re-read it sometime sooner rather than later. Have I somehow cheated? Spoiled something of a build up, a gradual revelation that had been carefully constructed by the author? Did I miss out on sharing Piransi's putting together of his story as he experienced it? Maybe. Perhaps I had a different set of a-ha moments: this is the point where x, who did y further on, is first introduced; this is why z happened later. More meta? That would probably be me (blame those undergraduate English days).
Piranesi gets a score of around 15%. I think it works that way. The only other book that would score on quite such an extreme would be Bodies of Light by Sarah Moss where I think I read two chapters in before heading to the end and working back. In that case, I think the book was improved by the reordering.
I'm going to call my technique the "Finnemore Method".
I don't ever give up on a book.
Last night I finished Susanna Clarke's Piranesi. I'd begun it sometime in the late summer/early autumn, put it aside, and picked it up last night an got through the remaining two thirds. Six months, maybe, elapsed time. Partly, this was the inconvenience of it being a physical copy, rather than electronic. But mostly, I just got stuck.
Or, another example, perhaps the most extreme. I was given, by a very dear friend, a copy of The White Guard by Mikael Bulgakov. It was my nineteenth birthday. Twenty years or so later, I sat down and finished it. But, at least, I finished it, the right way round.
I'd really rather finish a book than not and whilst I have the storage space and feel no guilt in having a large backlog (it does not very often call to to me like a heap of unfulfilled commitments, broken promises) there is something to be said for finishing a book before you've completely forgotten much of what you've read.
I was very careful with my wording of the end of that last sentence--"finishing a book before you've completely forgotten much of what you've read"--not saying, as I might have done "getting to the end of a book before you've completely forgotten what happened at the beginning", because I have a method that sometimes prevents a book transitioning from read in a few days to decades-long haul.
I confess, judge me as you will, that I always read the last page of a book pretty much as soon as I've read the first few pages. It's partly a habit borne of undergraduate years with a week to write an essay on a novelist or theme in the dim, dark days before the internet provided helpful summaries and full-text search to help with the speed-reading and digesting. It's also that I've found with non-fiction that I can get a good handle on a work by its index, appendices, bibliography, glossary, concluding chapter. I've written that way round, too: if the software's not done, but there are specifications, a legacy system, it's often possible to define the terms for the glossary, create some appendices, even before the meat of the text can be constructed.
I'm not, it appears, hung up on linearity. I've read many trilogies starting with book 2, or even book 3. I hop around hypertexts.
In sum, I do not feel bound to start a page 1 (or even page i: I read all the front matters [and hate how the Kindle takes me straight to the start of the main text so I have to go back to the front cover]) and read through to the end. That being said, at some point I set my eyes on the first line of the first chapter and start reading a book. Mostly, and in reasonable time, I whizz through and finally savour with more appreciation the final few paragraphs on the concluding page that were somewhat meaningless, somehow mysterious when I'd sampled them before.
Except, when I don't. I stall. I attempt to push forward. I read a page over. The next occasion I pick up the book, I re-read that page. I plough through the next, realise I've taken nothing in, read it again. Bogged down I consign the book to the shelf or leave it to sink down the list in the a-reading collection, supplanted by newer works.
When this happened with a David Brin, probably The Uplift War, I didn't put the book down. I was invested enough in the story to want to know how it got to the end. So interest was I that I went back to that last page that I'd already seen and read it again. I think the final chapter was short, so it seemed quite reasonable to read it in its entirety. And the penultimate chapter. And the ante-- After a handful of chapters, I had seen more conclusions to stories I'd hardly seen framed that I went back to the sticking place and shot through much of the remainder of the book. If I felt I was flagging, I marked my place and read another chapter back from the end, before returning to the more usual order or progress. I finished, or read all of, the book, and, I think, enjoyed it.
Several points arise from this. The first is the need, when dealing with physical volumes, for two bookmarks for any book getting this treatment. Not all do. Some just wait on the bookcase until I come back to them afresh.
The second is the interesting metric of where the two bookmarks meet. Since I always read the last page early, there's an implicit second bookmark just before the end of every book i read. So, if the start of chapter 1 is 0% and the end of the last paragraph of the final chapter is 100%, then no book I read hits 100%. Most hit as close to 100% as makes no odds. The others, the ones where the second bookmark slips back a few pages, whilst the first bookmark progresses in fits and starts, are more interesting.
Take Piranesi. I read part one with a little effort. And gave up awhile. When I restarted last night, I read maybe two or three pages into part 2 and then knew I was unlikly to go on. I reread the last page, and this was sufficiently interesting (exciting, even) that I read the final part. At the point I took the plunge and read the parts in reverse order finishing the rest of the book in a single sitting. Of course, it's not really about finishing, is it? It's about whether I enjoyed the book, which I did: I will re-read it sometime sooner rather than later. Have I somehow cheated? Spoiled something of a build up, a gradual revelation that had been carefully constructed by the author? Did I miss out on sharing Piransi's putting together of his story as he experienced it? Maybe. Perhaps I had a different set of a-ha moments: this is the point where x, who did y further on, is first introduced; this is why z happened later. More meta? That would probably be me (blame those undergraduate English days).
Piranesi gets a score of around 15%. I think it works that way. The only other book that would score on quite such an extreme would be Bodies of Light by Sarah Moss where I think I read two chapters in before heading to the end and working back. In that case, I think the book was improved by the reordering.
I'm going to call my technique the "Finnemore Method".
1/1241
