I’m an avid reader, but when do you stop reading a book? How do you decide that it’s just not the story, or characters, or writing for you and close it up and never pick it back up again?
I can admit that, sometimes, when I expect to struggle I carry on reading regardless. I had to accept that this would be the case with Middlemarch, which I recently finished reading. The language and sentence structure and general style of writing was so different in the nineteenth century. But once I got past the first hundred pages, I was hooked.
I’ve tried some Ebooks too – by new authors – in an attempt to support my fellow emerging writers. But if there are spelling errors, or the point of view alters half way through a paragraph, or they contradict themselves within a few pages, then I have to give up. Irritability takes hold and I can no longer connect with a story, no matter how good it might have been.
However, I’m now reading a novel by an established author. There isn’t anything wrong with it as such, I just can’t quite get on with it. The characters are flat somehow, as though they have no depth because they are keeping things too close to their chests. Some of them are unlikable, such as the husband who refused his wife a chance at a career but took one for himself based on the conditions he told her were unaccepptable, not to mention that he blatantly cheats on her.
I was confused from the prologue, as from 2014 it jumped back to 1975 and currently I’ve just started a chapter from 1940. I’m less than fifty pages in. I don’t think it would be so bad if it was from a single character’s point of view, but there have been at least four: one of which, in the prologue, doesn’t even seem connected to the story!
I’m on the brink of removing my bookmark and moving onto another novel. But then I consider that this is a top bestselling author and there must be a good story here… somewhere. Yet, should I read it even if I don’t care about the characters whose story it is?