Throwing in the Towel

After three months and four hundred pages, I’m giving up on Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. I don’t want to go into my problems with the book. There are plenty of places on the web where you can read about why people don’t like things; it shouldn’t be too hard to find one for this. I decided when I started this blog that whatever it ended up being, it would not be a place to post negative reviews. I still haven’t figured out what the hell this blog is, but I’m standing by that initial decision. And anyway, I don’t really have many problems with the book. Reading it, I was never not aware of its goodness, if not greatness.

I’m giving up because I just. can’t. be. arsed.

When my friends tell me that they’re not enjoying the books that they’re reading, I always encourage them to give up. I have a whole spiel stolen from half-a-dozen other people about life being too short, about there being too many books in the world, about how reading is supposed to be an act of joy, not one of tedium, about how a person’s free time is too precious to be spent doing things that he or she doesn’t enjoy. I always say it, and I’m pretty sure I believe it, but I definitely don’t practice it.

I love reading, of course, but I also love having read. Well-readness is a quality that I admire in other people, and that I’d like to see in myself. I keep various little lists of all the books I want to read–classics, contemporary fiction, biographies of people I’m interested in, cheap horror paperbacks–and I enjoy crossing titles off. I get that it’s vanity, but so what? No one’s going to look down on a marathon runner for feeling a sense of accomplishment for the races she’s completed, so long as she’s not going around bragging about it. I don’t mean to aggrandize the act of reading, but when you get to the end of a book like, I don’t know, War and Peace, or some shit, you feel like you’ve come a distance. It’s not like I’m going to bring it up at parties–”Ooh, that anecdote your telling reminds me of something that Tolstoy said”–but if someone asks, I’ll answer honestly. “Yes, I’ve read War and Peace.“

To be clear, I’ve never read War and Peace. But it’s on the list!

Anyway, the point of all this is basically that An American Tragedy is a book that I’ve wanted to read and to have read for while. It’s pretty high up on the Modern Library’s Top 100, it was considered smutty at the time, Dreiser himself was kind of a badass, and for fuck’s sake, it’s called An American Tragedy. That’s so ballsy! It might as well be called The Great American Novel. Only not, because that’s sissy shit. This is a tragedy.

But I couldn’t get through it. I started it in October, and since then have manged to put about 400 pages behind me, with another 400 or so to go. I think hitting the halfway point is what made me decide to give up. And maybe that’s where the marathon analogy breaks down (as if it ever held up)–don’t marathon runners usually hit the proverbial wall at mile 20? I didn’t make it that far. I got halfway over the course of three months and realized that that meant I had another three months to go. Unless my rate changed, I wouldn’t be done until March. That’s a lot of time to leave my lists collecting dust.

It’s not even that I didn’t enjoy reading it. I did, and like I said, I was struck by its quality while doing so. It’s that I never wanted to read it. The parts of my day that I usually spend reading–during my commute, on my lunch break, before going to bed–started to get occupied other ways. I listened to my iPod a lot. I joined Twitter. I spent more time than usual staring dumbly into space. Since I started An American Tragedy, I’ve read six other books, simply because I didn’t want to be reading that. Only one of them was as good.

So I’m taking my own preached-but-unpracticed advice. I’m acknowledging the shortness of my own life and moving on. I keep trying to tell myself that I’ll give it another shot later, but it’s bullshit and I know it. If I can’t convince myself to read An American Tragedy when I’m reading An American Tragedy, I sure as shit am not going to be able to convince myself when I’m not.

Sorry, Theodore. Look at it this way: the way I’m leaving Clyde and Roberta, there’s still a chance, albeit a slim one, that things might end up okay for them. I’ll just go ahead and assume that they do.