The Book that Ate Me

Agh. After such a great run of reading on vacation, it's all gone off the rails.

I made the mistake of picking up an obscure literary novel that I bought from the remainder table and put on my pile a year ago. In an effort to tame my bookshelves, I tried reading it.

200 pages in, I realized that the plot is moving glacially, the writing is not particularly engrossing, the characters are all horribly depressed and it's really going to end badly all around, isn't it? And yet I keep reading it and reading it. Why?

Well, at 300 pages I'm over halfway through, so I kind of want to see this trainwreck to the end. But there's another reason that I've just realized.

Over the last two years, since I've been pursuing writing seriously, as a reader I've become some sort of abominable sponge that never fills up. With every book I read, I notice more and more - adjectives, dialogue tags, pace, word choice, voice. I'm soaking it all up with frightening energy. I'm like a person whose lifelong hearing disability has suddenly disappeared, and I'm thrilled to hear a car door slam a block away.

And this book - this book is like hearing all the nighttime car alarms and boring conversations and bad music that I couldn't hear before. The stuff that makes you wish you were deaf again. And as a writer I can't help but think that this is sort of instructional in its painful way. After all, how do we learn how to write without learning how not to write?

And boy, is this book teaching me that. Half a page of asking everyone what drink they want and pouring it for them? Help.

I have good books waiting for me, if I come out of the belly of the whale...