(Not) Finishing the Book

Okay, it is time for me to face some harsh truths about this little New Years Resolution project of mine.

Truth one: I'm not going to actually finish my entire library by the end of this year. I was probably never going to finish the whole library in one year, but I guess I thought I could put a sizable dent in it. Maybe get to the M's.

Truth two: Sometimes, you just don't want to finish the book.

The book this blog entry would have been about is On Being a Christian by Swiss Theologian Hans Küng. It is a very dense and dry book, although not without its points of interest. It was loaned to me (along with Theology for the Third Millennium by the same author) by my father after I expressed an interest in Theology many years ago. It has mostly just sat on shelves and in boxes at different points since, a 700 page leviathan that I was afraid to approach. Then came this crazy New Years Resolution. I was going to have to read it, as per the rules I established for myself. After finishing A Prayer for Owen Meaney back in February, I cracked the spine on Küng.

Progress was slow. It is so dry it was rarely able to keep my attention for more than a few pages at a time. Weeks went by without any progress at all. Wade would call me and goad me on, but even with that encouragement I found it a chore to return to Küng. I took to keeping a text document with my responses to Küng's points along with quotes that I liked. But that only helped a little. I was still massively bored by it.

Why? Why was I bored by this? I have always found religion to be an interesting topic, and I didn't have nearly this much trouble with Robert M. Price's The Christ-Myth Theory and its Problems back in the fall (although I was reading it for a paper I was writing, so that helped). I came to realize that I was more interested in historical and social trends related to religion and how individuals connect with religious belief than I was with Theology. That isn't to say that I didn't find some interest in the book. But the interesting parts were few and far between in the 248 pages that I wound up getting through.

There came a point where Wade stopped encouraging me to finish the book and started encouraging me to not finish the book. He thought that at least I should skip the second Hans Küng book. He reasoned with me that since I had a rule to allow myself to read other books in a series if I decided I liked the one I had, that I should also be able to decide not to continue reading if I didn't like the first book. While these two Küng books are not technically in a series together, I still take his point, which leads to:

Truth three: I need to revise the rules.

So as of now, if I decided that I don't like an author, I don't have to read any more of that author's books. However, if I decide that I do like them, I can pick up more books by that author and read them before continuing on with my project. Also, and this is the biggest change: I don't have to finish the book.

I know! This is antithesis to the very name of the blog! But I came across this infographic a couple of days ago, and it finally got me thinking about just... not finishing. I quite liked one of the quotes in the infographic. "I once heard that the rule for when to abandon a book is 100 minus your age." That's probably a pretty good rule. That isn't to say that a book might not start out slow and pick up by the end, but do I really have another five months to slog through a book just to find out? If I'm lucky, I have another 50 years of book reading ahead of me. If I keep at my current pace with Küng, I'll have wasted one of those years on a book I'm not even enjoying that much. This is unacceptable. So although the title of this blog is "Finishing the Book(s)", I have decided that when it becomes apparent that finishing a particular book is going to come at the expense of future books, then it does not have to be finished. I'll give it 100 pages minus my age.

So fare thee well, Hans Küng. You'll be finding your way back to my father's bookshelf soon. I've already started the next book in this blog series, I'm already half way through, and I already know that I made the right decision.

Next time: The Adventure of the Ectoplasmic Man by Daniel Stashower.