Putting Books Down

On not finishing books, the value of a hatchet job, and the sunk-cost fallacy.

“[B]adly written books will always be with us to test our charity.”

[Alberto Manguel, “Into the Looking-Glass Wood”]

In the last edition of this column, I wrote about Dave Eggers’ novel The Circle, and I was less than flattering about it. In my defence, I mostly repeated what other reviewers had written about the book, which shows I’m in good (if crabby) company. What was it Captain Yossarian said in response to the age-old question, What if everyone felt that way? “Then I’d certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn’t I?” Of course I’m not really seeking to hide in consensus, and I stand by my criticism of Eggers’ novel. I just didn’t feel great about airing it publicly.

I’m sceptical about the lasting usefulness of a hatchet job, even as I thrill over a good one just like everyone else. (There I go again with the safety-in-numbers routine.) I’d much rather spend my time writing about what’s wonderful in a brilliant novel, or at least what works even in mediocre books. In a book review, I’d be as evenhanded as I could, mentioning all the good that comes with the bad (because, after all, very few books are entirely bad). But this isn’t a book review.

The point of this column is to write honestly about my experiences as a reader. I’m going to be evangelical about the books I love and upfront about the ones I don’t. So, what follows reflects only how my civilian mind (which seems to house the worse demons of my nature) is feeling, rather than what the better angels of my critical mind might write if given the space.

Which brings us to The Every, Dave Eggers’ follow-up to The Circle.

---

As I write this, my bookmark sits about halfway through the total 577 pages (a significant number, as we’ll see). It’s taken me three weeks to get to this midpoint. In the meantime, I’ve read (and happily finished) three other books, in between which I kept returning to The Every for another few chapters of its techno-dystopian story, where a global corporation might destroy humanity through enforced conformity, the radical denial of all negative emotion, and cat videos. The apocalypse will be digitised.

I just keep wishing the world in this book would end already. The first book had the admirable quality of being highly entertaining, which is why I tried the sequel, hoping to at least have some fun. Sadly, the sequel is so bloated and contrived that what entertainment value it might have had is diluted to the point of not being able to detect it. The chief problem is that while The Circle featured a protagonist who was stupid, The Every expects its reader to be stupid.

The empty sock of a main character, Delaney, is devoid of anything truly human, in a moral, personal, or intellectual sense. She has the emotional range of a Keanu Reeves performance, shifting from vaguely anxious about her new job to mildly irritated with her only friend (a friendship based on proximity more than any evident affection). Her vehemently held conviction on page 20 that she will destroy the Every (the tech company at the heart of the story) evaporates by page 22. First we’re told this:

“She’d waited years for the chance to work at the company, to enter the system with the intent of destroying it. […] Once inside, Delaney planned to examine the machine, test for weaknesses, and blow the place up. She would Snowden it, Manning it. She would feel it out and Felt it. She did not care if she did it in the civilised, covert, information-dump sort of way her predecessors practiced, or through a more frontal assault. She intended to harm no one, never to graze a physical hair on a physical head, but somehow she would end the Every, finish its malignant reign on earth.”

Two pages later, she’s changed her mind. Why? Because someone she meets at the company is kind to her. Her motivations for opposing the company are tepid to begin with — Delaney recovered from a teenage phone addiction (the details of which play out like someone whose never owned a smartphone but thought reading Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation substituted for firsthand knowledge) and now she’s angry at the Every for inflicting that addiction on everyone. Or mad that her parents have to work for the company. Or something.

---

Look, I don’t want to rag on this book more than I have to. This is just a taste of why I want to shelve the book and turn to something new. And about a third of the way in, I was going to stop reading, so I picked it up and flicked through the pages ahead, the way I always do when I’m unsure about a book, as if I’ll find the sentence that’s so witty and gorgeous and insightful that I realise I almost missed out on a glorious reading experience, or stumble over a line so contorted and vapid and aesthetically abhorrent that it reassures me I’m right to want to throw it across the room. As I flipped a few pages ahead of where I was at that point, a paragraph near the top of a page caught my eye. I scanned it for context: two characters were discussing the Every’s statistical approach to art. Their scientists have quantified literature and discovered that “no book should be over 500 pages, and if it is over 500, we found that the absolute limit to anyone’s tolerance is 577”.

I had an idea, so I checked. Yep — The Every is 577 pages long.¹ In another book, this might have been cute but it annoyed the hell out of me here, coming off not as endearing but as self-satisfied. Still, the taunt worked. I couldn’t let that stupid made-up stat in this infuriating book be correct, not about me. My vanity made me push on.

Now I’m at the midpoint of The Every and wondering if I can (or should) push on any further. My rule of thumb is to give a book to about halfway before abandoning it. Even this was hard to make peace with at first. At whatever age it was that I began having “rules” around my own reading, I defaulted to a kind of Protestant work ethic about finishing books. To give up was a failure on my part — rather than the book’s failure to convince me to read on — and I saw the completion of a book, especially one that was difficult to finish, as a light at the top of the mountain that I forced myself to climb manfully towards, like Dante passing through the cleansing fires of Mount Purgatory to reach Paradise.

I took many years to fully realise how little reading I’d ever get done in this life relative to how much reading there was to be done. That meant, of course, sifting through the options to pick the worthiest books, because who wants to waste their finite time on anything less than transcendence? (Yes, I was insufferable.) That’s how I reached a stage in my reading life where all I read was the most challenging and supposedly profound literature and I had to read every word. It was exhausting.

Worse, although it was intended to let me live this earthly life to its fullest, it actually meant I experienced a very narrow slice of what it means to be a reader, or even a human. A major food group for the soul is joy, and I was becoming malnourished. I was forcing myself to chew on the cruciferous stuff of Serious Literature until it had lost its flavour, never letting myself taste the cake others were having for dessert. (This food metaphor is about to run itself out, but it does have one more point to make: like a balanced diet, the healthy reading should be prioritised, but the occasional treat should be enjoyed.)

To fix my literary diet, I began reading in a way that filled all the corners of my soul with books that satisfied each nook and cranny of its wants and needs. I reacquainted myself with the novels of my childhood and rediscovered what made me first love reading; I followed unusual fascinations into non-fiction books; and I found enough kindness towards myself to start enjoying the so-called “beach read” in places other than beaches.

This was a trade-off that meant I couldn’t read quite as many classics and avant-garde fiction as I used to. That’s how I came to my second adjustment for better reading. Accepting the limits of life, I decided to swap any book that I wasn’t enjoying for one that I thought I would, sloganizing this as Life’s Too Short For Bad Books.

---

I use the shorthand of talking about books “I’m not enjoying”, but there are actually two criteria for dismissing a novel:

1. I’m not having fun, I’m not excited to pick the thing back up, and it feels like a chore. There are two tells that reveal a book is of this kind:

   1. I’m constantly aware of the page count, glancing down at that slowly ascending number and flipping ahead every few pages to see how many more remain;

   2. I’m conscious, at any level, of some other person’s opinion of my reading or not reading this book — that is, I’m reading it to be able to tell others I’ve read it, and/or I don’t want to ditch it for what others might think of my inconstancy.

2. I’m not learning anything I value from reading this book. Sometimes, I might not be enjoying a book but I need the information it’s imparting. It helps if it’s also not that big an opportunity cost (ie. it’s a short book, or can be broken into small morsels to be read between the main meals of other, better books).

Both of these criteria must be met, because some books are important to read in spite of being somewhat dull, because the mind sometimes has needs that the heart knows nothing of; other books are worth reading even if they don’t fundamentally change your life or add to your intellectual or cultural stock, because they make you happy. I like to believe it’s possible to be intelligent and also not a miserable sod.

Giving a book until its midpoint is a little arbitrary. I know others who give a book the first three chapters, some who allow only one, and I’ve heard rumours of some bold readers who will drop a book after a few terrible pages. I settled on halfway because I felt that was ample time for a writer to reveal their talent or lack thereof, and it’s enough space for me to be sure that this book fails my two criteria. The problem with The Every is that it’s almost 600 pages long — at halfway through, I’ve read a whole novel’s worth of the thing. This makes it perversely much harder to abandon. I’ve given so much time to this thing that I’m loathe to give it up.

I know, I know: this is called the sunk-cost fallacy² and it’s an error in reasoning. It feels like a waste of the time I put into these 300 pages to not finish the story. But what will I gain at the end of the next 277 pages? Probably nothing but the ability to say I finished it. Best case scenario, the book reveals itself to be a work of true genius in its second half, but I could instead read a novel that’s great from start to finish.

Joan Didion said she wrote to find out what she thought about things. Having put these words to digital paper, I’ve found my answer to the question that inspired this edition: I’m putting The Every back on the shelf. It’s time to find something else.

***

How to Read and Why, by James Marriott in Cultural Capital

How to read and why

“I love reading and I love advice about how to read,” Marriott says at the top of this piece. As one of those god-awful optimisers intent on improving every quantifiable aspect of my life, I’m a sucker for any “How to Read” essay. Age and exhaustion have taught me to soften, so these days that perfectionism is much less rigid and more of a “wouldn’t it be nice” notion, like sleeping eight hours at night or having a retirement plan. Still, given that I spend more time in a week reading than doing anything else (including sleep, sadly for that eight-hour goal) it’s always nice to get tips on how I might be doing it better, and to share in the experience with other compulsive book-botherers.

The following made me feel much better about my choice to move on from The Every and read something less disagreeable:

“You can waste a lot of time trudging dutifully through a book you feel you should read. By the time you get to the end you are unlikely to remember much. In the same time you could have read several books that really compelled you and retained a lot more from them.”

In case I’m ever tempted to take this immodest right to ditch books too far, I will try to remember this too:

“The better a book’s reputation, the harder I will try with it. A recent non-fiction book that is dull or thinly-written I will put aside without compunction. But if I’m reading, say, The Brothers Karamazov (a book I finished recently and found hard-going for long stretches) I tend to assume the problem is me not Dostoevsky and try to keep going. A level of humility is a good attribute in a reader.”

I’ve noticed something of a correlation between the quality of a publication and its comment section; Cultural Capital seems to have unusually perceptive readers (and, for any of them reading this and considering subscribing to another publication, might I add charming, droll, profoundly wise, and disarmingly attractive).³ I particularly appreciated this comment from EJC, which builds on Marriott’s discussion of the differences between audiobooks/podcasts and physical books:

“I now see podcasts as a catalyst, or a gateway to a topic. As a fellow fan of The Rest is History you’ll know what I mean when I say that I don’t listen to learn (especially), but to be enthused by a topic I’d never have expected to find interesting. This then opens the floodgates to a world of reading I’d not otherwise have explored.”

I do the same without having articulated it this way, so reading this helped me to clarify my internal hierarchy (which is really about the relative usefulness) of various kinds of reading and listening.

So, if you love “How to Read” articles, pointers to good books, or articulate and entertaining writing about culture, this piece is worth your time.

---

1. What are we supposed to take from this, or from the moment where a character asserts that readers skip over letters in epistolary novels? “But we found they were willing to read them if the letters were less than 450 words each, spaced every hundred pages or so, and were included in the body of the text—same size, same font, same indentation, and decidedly never italic.” This is what Eggers does with the letters he places throughout The Every. So, his novel conforms to the philistine dictums of the Every’s research on literature. Are we supposed to infer that the company has run this novel through its algorithms to make it more “readable”? To what end? And have they run Dave Eggers’ novel through its formulae, or is this book the work of someone “in-universe”?

2. As described by Decision Lab (here):

“The sunk cost fallacy is our tendency to follow through with something that we’ve already invested heavily in (be it time, money, effort, or emotional energy), even when giving up is clearly a better idea.”

3. This correlation only reliably goes one way: a lack of comments doesn’t necessarily mean much about the quality of the essay (he says, glancing at the empty space beneath most of his own essays) but smart comments are rarely found on asinine articles.