Friday, June 8, 2007

I'm a quitter

I’ve been trying to read the same book since the first week of April, and I’ve finally surrendered and given up. Usually I read a book in a week or maybe two weeks if it’s long, so taking this long on one book and not even being halfway through it is kind of like slamming my hand in a car door repeatedly. Each time I pick it up and try to read another page it feels like I’m getting poked in the eye with a railroad spike, but now that I finally gave up on it, I have a nice, crushing feeling of failure, since I haven’t put a book down without finishing it since junior high.

It’s a lose/lose situation.

I was trying to read Stanley Coren’s "The Left Hander Syndrome". I’m left handed, so a book that claimed to be able to tell me how I got that way, if it’s true that I’ll die sooner than right handed people, whether or not I’m more creative, and a number of other questions seemed like it would be interesting.

It wasn’t.

It’s like Coren had someone go through and remove any metaphor, any analogy, any attempt at colloquial language, and did their best to make this as boring, dense, and dryly academic as possible. Granted the subject matter doesn’t seem like it should really set the world on fire or that it would be a gripping page turner, but reading this was a terrible experience.

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