Ordinary Day

When I was younger, I used to finish pretty much every book I started. (There are some classics which I tried reading at too young of an age, got about a chapter in and went 'yeah, I can not deal with this prose style anymore' - Les Miserables comes to mind here, as does War and Peace. To be fair to me, I think I was eleven and I had made it through The Foundation Trilogy, The Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit, and The Mists of Avalon, so it's not like I hadn't made it through big, thick, books before.)

Now... I kind of figure if it's not holding my attention enough that I wander away from it or find myself wanting to read something else, I don't have enough time or energy for reading everything I want to as it is. (There are exceptions that I just read through slowly because I can only take so much at once, or for which I have to be in the right mood.)

Well, and if I'm editing something for a friend, of course, I stick with it and read all the way through, but that seems like a given. It's not that I /can't/ stick with reading stuff, just... why should I force myself to do something that I'm really not enjoying as my recreational time. I have plenty of things that I don't enjoy that I could be doing that would be far more useful than reading any given piece of fiction, unless there's some other purpose. (And despite what the author of that article claims, I have /far/ more often found that if I am being annoyed or bored by a book, I will continue to be annoyed or bored by a book for the entire rest of the book. It's not universal, and I will certainly take 'it gets slow in the middle, but push on because it picks up again' from friends into account, but seriously... what kind of puritanical 'We must suffer for our enjoyment' is this attitude about?)

As the writer, part of their job is to /keep me engaged and entertained and not wanting to throw the book across the room/. It is decidedly not /my/ job to make up for the lack of ability to do any of that on the part of an author. (with the possible exceptions being a) I am editing, b) it is a friend's book, and c) I have, for whatever reason, been tasked with adapting or reviewing the book. If none of those are the case and no one is compensating me for reading it, I really think this falls under 'Get off your moral high horse. You can do whatever you want with your spare/recreational/free time, but do not presume to tell me what I should be doing with mine, you sanctimonious jerk.' (And I really would have minded the article much less if it didn't have that obnoxiously sanctimonious 'I am a much better person than you people who don't finish books' thing going on all through it.)