How (And When) Not To Read A Book

I want to start this post with an apology: No, this is not a review, sorry if you expected otherwise. Instead, I want to share an opinion with you – and I hope to spark a few comments, because I’m really curious about YOUR thoughts on this.

As the title suggests, I want to talk about how to not read a book. Because let’s be honest: reading a book is very simple. Not reading it, on the other hand, can be a major strain on the psyche of any book lover, because in its wake comes the Abbreviation of Abandoning: the DNF pile. Oh, and how awful those three letters sound!

Awful, because we are avid readers, books are like the offspring of our mind, and DNFing a book feels like killing a kitten. Something horribly, right? Something we don’t want to do. Yes, we must not give in to our cravings of killing a book! (*Insert maniacal laughter here*)

Of course, there might be a good reason for you to abandon a book. Maybe the easiest one that comes to your mind is: because it’s crap.

I urge you to resist this temptation, and instead try to find out if this book is really crap, and for whom? All potential readers out there, or just You? And really for You (wholesome), or for the flavor of the moment of You?

Because You are not a constant. No one is, after all. The You that existed yesterday is not the same You that exists now, or will exist tomorrow. And no, I’m not talking about metaphysics, or in a spiritual sense, either. I’m just after the fact that we behave differently over the course of our life, a year, sometimes even over the course of a day or an hour! I think it’s called moods, and sometimes Your current world view will change with experiences.

That being said, I do have a rather small DNF pile. I’ve got a much larger HFY pile, though. And it is this idea – the HFY pile – that I want to introduce to you: Haven’t Finished Yet.

Because I’ve realized that the circumstances might change, and so will the way I experience a book. And I like to illustrate this with an example:

In the early days of my Kindle, back in 2011, I bought the whole Bigend cycle (I call it the Blue Ant Cycle) by William Gibson. It is his third three book cycle, after the Sprawl Cycle (the Neuromancer cycle) and the Bridge cycle (also known as the Futurematic cycle). I’ve enjoyed both of them, so clearly I expected a lot of the third cycle, starting with Pattern Recognition. So I dug into it – because, what could go wrong?

Clearly, the answer is everything, all at once. Until this day, I do not know why I clashed so hard against this book. There are several suspects, though:

• It was my first time reading Gibson in his native language. I’ve read German translations of his first two novels.
• Contrary to the first two cycles, this one is not cyberpunk (Sprawl) or post-cyberpunk (Bridge). In fact, Gibson moves back in time and technology; this book is more Speculative Science Fiction, and so it was very different from what I was expecting
• I also had a different sense of the meaning of pattern recognition; I expected someone working with data, and that spoke to me because this was kind of my job back then. (And where was some data centered pattern recognition in the Bridge cycle.)

All in all, the story started out to be everything I didn’t expect it to be, and that led me to abandon it (I haven’t even touched the next two books).

But I’ve decided today to give it another go. Because my cyberpunk cravings can be fulfilled in another way, and I don’t hold the same expectations I did back then, and since this was easily a decade ago, most importantly I am not the same reader I was back then.

In other words: this book was pulled from my HFY pile, and if you have one of those, you don’t need to fret about stopping to read a book. Instead of killing it with the DNF, you can instead give in with gay abandon (in the other meaning of the word abandon) to put it in your HFY pile.

Feels good, doesn’t it?