Rotten Reading, Reading for Rotters

Relax, read and skip the boring bits, why don't you?

Writers naturally love to devote their column inches to writing about writing. But what about the art of reading? Here’s the context: my daughter confessed how she gets through so many books. She skips through the boring bits. Which, for your information are the descriptive passages.

    The books she reads aren’t high brow stuff, so I can’t see how when she skips the descriptions, she‘s not also missing essential bits too. It smacks of heresy, as cheating, as missing out on the best, most nutritious bits.

It's a sin.

   She’s tender in years, and pulls the same trick when eating. I peel and cut and dice and saute, steam and slave, then when the meal’s on the plate, within a minute, there’s a carnage of discarded vegetables. Many of which I get her to pass across. Eat, sort, eat, sort, discard. Repeat. 

   I feel bad.

   Her favourite authors have laboured - poured their very life - into creating a word world to transport her to an exotic location or specific place, only for their magic to be wilfully and wantonly gutted. I hope no one does that to anything I‘ve written. How rude!

   In her defense, maybe she is developing a useful skill. Of cutting away what she considers dead wood to reveal the freshest and most succulent story shoots - even if the relative pulp would be a literary treat for me.

    I admit it. Description can be a bore. Endless suffocating detail stopping the forward thrust of the story, getting in the way of the action and character development; but with good writers, it’s mostly woven into the fabric of the story, illuminating details and directing the reader. Maybe she’s not found good writing. This is a worrisome horse of a different colour.

   I well remember struggling with The Fellowship of The Rings. When the happy party set off into the mountains, I gladly set off to read another more interesting book - or at least not as challenging. It does take a while to appreciate the scenery and develop the powers to draw the worlds from the words. So maybe once she’s developed her chops, she’ll start nibbling away at those descriptions. Late middle age should do it.

   Having recently reread Piranisi by Susannah Clarke, I admit, the descriptions of the halls and statues had me fearing I’d either DNF or continue and berate myself for not skipping bits - my memory served me well however, and the descriptions do segue into the story after a while.

   I’m also a bit jealous. Perhaps it is something I should do; after all, I’ve accumulated countless books. And the rate of acquisition is increasing, not diminishing. If only I could summon up the nerve to skip a few bits, I’d whip through my To-Read pile. But I’d worry that I’d missed something of importance. Also that I couldn’t genuinely tell myself I’d read the work.

   “Have you read War and Peace?” 

   “I read the good bits and bypassed the rest. Took about twenty minutes.” Hmmn. It won’t do for me, I’m afraid. Will it do for you?