The Full Treatment
I was getting to the point in the book where I was going to commit the most heinous act. It’s this little thing I do to get the book done even if am not really reading the whole thing. It is about catching strings of words that get your attention, jumping over lines of text, cutting up this work into just those pieces I happen to scan.
I do this when I give up on a book and don’t want to merely stop reading it. This particular book lost me, and yet I didn’t want to just let it go. I should cut my losses, I know. And yet I need to at least know how bad this book can get.
This technique has fuzzy rules, like the kind you find in speed reading. The “full treatment” is when I expose myself to what I please because dedicating the long hours to properly finish it is just too much to take. The five or six times I have had to use this technique, no good ever came out of it.
The rules are so ambiguous, they are only there to make me feel better about the situation. If the paragraphs are of moderate size, I read that one sentence at the beginning of each paragraph to get a sense of the direction. If paragraphs are too long, I read the first full sentence at the top of each page and the one at the bottom. If dialogue breaks up the pages with too many short paragraphs, I’ll glide over them to catch the gist. This is all about converting the page into picture-book depth, teasing out some sidewise meaning that the book did not intend, and creating gaps in the existence of characters that I deemed not keen enough to matter.
Like I said, I’ve only done this a few times. I promise myself that this is the last time I do this. In the past, I would never abandon a book; I had to finish everything. But the new me finds no point in finishing the books that don’t resonate — because there is so much out there that is just not worth the time, and if you are not a particularly fast reader and have timed your reading speed to just so many books in one year, and have multiplied that by some hypothetical number of years that you feel you still have ahead of you, you will find that you will not even come near to reading every book you have ever wanted to read.
So, the bad books are just speed bumps, just so many ways to kill time, with no value to their completion once all curiosity is sapped except maybe just so that you can say you read the damn thing!