I finally had to invoke Nancy Pearl’s "rule of 50" on a book. It goes something like this.
If you still don’t like a book after slogging through the first 50 pages, set it aside. If you’re more than 50 years old, subtract your age from 100 and only grant it that many pages.
The idea is that life is too short and there are too many good books to read anyway. So, Ghost Wars is on the shelf for now. Not because it’s not a good read, but because I’m just not in the frame of mind to read it. I got about 150 pages in, with long breaks in between to read other books. But with Ghost Wars, I found my attention wandering from the page every couple of sentences, which made it difficult to keep up with the huge cast of characters involved. I think I need to read it when I can give it my undivided attention. So, I’ll come back to it.
So, having finished We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, I’ve moved on to a couple of new books that have been sitting on my shelf, waiting for me to get to them. I picked them up along with We wish to inform you…, when I ran in to a buy-2-get-3rd-free sale at a bookstore.
Guns, Germs and Steel, by Jared Diamond, has been on my "to read" list for a few years now. I didn’t read it back when it seemed like everyone else in the world was reading it, probably because I had my nose buried in Derrick Jensen’s books. It’s interesting to start reading it this week, given the discussion about innate intelligence that’s been going on across several blogs. As I’ve hinted before, I tend to recoil from the question "Why did history unfold differently on differnt continents?" because the answers often tend to racist to some degree of another. After reading the preface of Diamond’s book, I think I’m going to enjoy seeing how he answers the question.
Seymour Hersh’s Chain of Command is another one that’s been on my list since it was published. I read (and blogged about) his New Yorker articles breaking the story about Abu Ghraib. Based on those I think this will be a good read, plus it kind of picks up where Ghost Wars would have left off.
The last book on the shelf, waiting to wrap up my summer reading binge is The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design.
So, what’s everyone else reading?
That’s a great rule of thumb. Think my professors will agree when I tell them why I didn’t finish an assigned book?
I always feel guilty giving up on a book. It must be all that schooling urging me to try harder and work at it. I agree – if it isn’t enjoyable you should let it go.