I was sitting in my favorite morning chair wrapped in a nice warm comforter working on my journal, a cup of hot tea at my side. I took a sip of the tea and.... Yuck. Not a flavor I like at all.
It was a new flavor that sounded wonderful on the box with a lot of things I generally like in my tea - lemon, honey, ginseng... all wonderful ingredients. But I must have been in a hurry when I purchased it because I obviously didn't read the fine print in the ingredients. The "lemon" is not the yellow citrus fruit I love, but the herb, lemon verbena, which I do not like at all. It ranks right down there with lemon balm. There's something about the smell and taste of them that doesn't work for me.
So did I force myself to finish that cup, hoping I'd grow to like it? Nope. Past experience has taught me that no matter how many times I try the herbal "lemon" flavors, I do not like them. So I dumped it and got another cup - one that I know I like (Earl Grey in case you're wondering).
And it's become that way with books for me. Henry David Thoreau once said "books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written." Maybe that was true in 1854. But I'm not sure if it holds today. If I read the first few pages and don't like what I see, I will rarely finish the book any more. I just don't have the time to waste. I might read up to twenty-five pages, but if I get that far and it's still not working, that's it. It goes in my discard pile and I go on to the next one. I used to force myself to read a book all the way through. After all, someone took the time to write it and a publisher somewhere thought it was decent enough to publish. But not anymore - unless I'm reading it for a review, then I do read the whole thing.
So I'm asking you - when faced with a book you don't care for, do you read the whole thing just to see how it comes out? Or do you read the beginning and then jump to the end or dump it after the beginning?
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"Keep reading books, but remember that a book's only a book, and you should learn to think for yourself." - Maxim Gorky
2 comments:
I'm with you, Mom! My time is too valuable to waste on books I don't like... or tea I don't like. :) Oh. I'm sitting here drinking the Gingersnap tea you gave me that you didn't like last winter. MMM... What is this one? Will I like it?
I used to be the same way, forcing myself to get through it because I'd paid for it and I needed to get my money's worth. Somewhere along the line I realized that was backwards thinking. :) I don't do it anymore. If something bugs me on page 1, or if I get to page 100, set it down, and go a few days without wanting to pick it up again, I put it in the "donate to the library" pile.
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