Another book I may not finish

Having a hard time getting through Eifelheim by Michael Flynn. It was a finalist for a Hugo in 2007 and I picked it up at the Book Barn.

The premise is fascinating and original, but unfortunately, the execution stinks. And once again reminds me why I don't put stock in Hugo awards as any indicator of a book being any good. As my fiancee said, "A lot of the Hugo winners are crap." Never were truer words spoken.

The most annoying feature is the technical-term laden conversation two scientists have in the beginning, with one of the scientists throwing in entire sentences in Latin, German, French, and I think Polish during the conversation without the author bothering to translate or explain what they mean. It had me wondering what editor let that slide without asking the author if it was strictly necessary to piss the reader off from the get-go to achieve what, basically, amounts to a little exposition and the beginning of the plot. Give me a red pen and an hour and I could fix that mess for you so that actual human beings might want to read it, but nobody asked me, unfortunately.

Also? It might be nice if the author bothered defining such terms as cliology, geodesics, and non-Abelian, since they're apparently vital to the plot points that are going to occur. 40 pages in, and so far I've just been really freaking bored and confused and there's no indication from flipping ahead that there's going to be any pay off for continued patience.

Just a note to Very Learned Writer Folk out there: If I need an advanced degree in something just to know what your characters are talking about and you don't make that feeling go away in one hell of a hurry, then you've failed as a writer. Hard.

I think I'll give up on this particular book, because life is short and if I want to learn about such things, I'll go get a non-fictional source so I don't have be annoyed by a cast of characters that I absolutely do not care about and a bunch of scientific terms that are ill-explained and would be better learned about from better sources this this piece of crap.

Why I Read

I think it is helpful, if only for my own fun, sport, and edification to enumerate the reasons that I read what, how, and when I do. And why I stop reading books when I do.

First and foremost, I read either to learn or be entertained. Hopefully, a bit of both. I find learning new things to be a form of entertainment. Or if not entertainment, then enjoyment. I derive pleasure and satisfaction from adding to my knowledge of the world, especially if it's done in such a way that it opens a new interest to me, something undiscovered and waiting to be mined for more treasures. I'm sort of sad for this reason that I'm so dysfunctional at math that I could never understand physics beyond what gets explained to me on the History Channel. I think I'd like contemplating the universe and tiny particles and time and space and playing with the fabric of reality in my head and thinking about how you can unify the way the big and small all move together. That is, if there can be unification. I've always suspected that there'll never be a unifying theory of physics because physics isn't unified.

But I digress. The point is, I do like to learn from books. While I'm mostly a fiction reader, I do occasionally have a quick fling with non-fiction, either of science or historical variety, if I am so tempted.

I don't consider reading for sheer pleasure to somehow be less worthy a venture than reading for Important Literary Intellectual Reasons. Entertainment is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. So long as you don't do it to excess or to someone else's detriment. It's good to light up the pleasure centers of your brain with positive activities like sports or reading or enjoying art or playing with the small mammalian creature of your choice (children, dogs, ponies. Anything will do). It's good to have something that affirms that the crap you put up with is balanced out. That there is indeed a pay off for continuing to suck oxygen and belt out carbon dioxide, that there's a reason not to off yourself so someone can have your kidneys and corneas.

You need that, I think, in your life.

So maybe you're not building an ivory tower with your brain cells from reading. Some people do this and it does push their happy buttons. I try not to make judgments or sweeping statements about what is and isn't acceptable. If pushing yourself intellectually through reading, regardless of pleasure, is what makes you feel your time is well spent, by all means. I applaud you. Just don't look down your furrowed brow at those who get their buzz elsewhere.

Maybe you're reading just for the tingly feelings and the warm fuzzy kittens that solve crime and reassuring routines that ease you into a state of satisfaction with each repetition. The bad guy loses, the caper is foiled, the meddling kids win again, the dashing hero sweeps the heroine away with a charming smile and witty rejoinder.

The fact is that life is short, and the hours you spend doing things you don't need to do (work, mandatory school, eating, laundry, cleaning, etc) are your own to dispose of as you chose. But you don't get a refund on those hours if they don't make you happy or justify themselves. Even if they were taken from you unfairly, without your consent.

You won't always get to control these types of things in life. In fact, most times it'll be out of your hands. So I figure that what is in your keeping, what you can control you must control absolutely. People and things and circumstances will steal time from you like seagulls plucking bits of food off an unguarded picnic table. So you must protect what precious bits you can keep to yourself and enjoy it.

If you read a book and it doesn't add anything worthwhile to your life experiences, either pleasure or knowledge or whatever it is you value, you don't get that hour or two or however many you spent back. It's gone forever.

I think this stems from me being an especially selfish person. Not with things, but with time. I'm very greedy and possessive of my time, because I feel acutely aware that one day, I will die. I will be on a deathbed somewhere and I don't think I'll be ready to die. Ever. I'll want to live so bad that I'll wish and pray for God to grant me another hour, another day, another week, another month, another year.

When the end comes, you'll want those wasted hours back. You'll want the time you spent waiting in line, in doctor's offices, in airports back.

But it won't happen. Time doesn't flow that way. Well, not unless you're a very small and strange kind of theoretical particle (at least that's how I understand it). But you're not. You're a very large and strange kind of particle called a Human Being. Time only goes unmercifully forward.

I think part of me believes that if I fill my life with things I think are worthwhile, even if they may be less-than-gratifying in the short term (like *grumble grumble* frickin' exercise and dieting), that when the times comes that I can't stay here anymore, I'll be less hesitant to go. Maybe I'll even be ready.

So, sometimes, I put down a book because I'm not willing to look down that long tunnel and think that I hastened it's coming by plowing through that particular literature. Does that mean it's a bad book? I don't know. It means it's a bad book for me, certainly.

Which is not to say that in a year or two I won't be ready for it. Books, like everything else, have their season. Ones that I hated a year ago I might love today. Books I once was in love with as a kid are now bewildering, boring, or just plain abysmal to me now.

But I've stopped telling myself, in that old English teacher voice that still lingers in my head, that I must finish every book I pick up. I'm an adult, I can stop. I can quit. I can go somewhere else. Maybe that means I miss some satisfying books that would've gotten good if I'd kept going. But maybe it means I get to pick up other books I might not have had time to read if I hadn't stopped.

Sometimes I feel a bit of inferiority complex about this, especially since reading as a physical activity is sometimes a challenge for me, but I tell myself that this isn't school. It's not a competition. I'm not on anyone else's clock by my own, and that there's no prize for wasting time. There's just hours you don't get back, and the Invisible, Imaginary Better-Than-Me Judgmental People I was trying to impress will not hand out refunds, even if I come with receipt and tags in hand.