I’m sitting here chuckling to myself. I’ve just gone through several novels in a row where I read the first couple of chapters, got bored, then read the ending with no desire to go back and read the bulk of the book I missed. What amuses me is that this is the way I read most books now, reading just the ending, and yet with The Wheel of Time, I skip the ending completely.
Well, maybe it isn’t that funny, but for a minute there, I saw the humor.
I just had the terrible thought that for the rest of my life, I’m going to be rereading those same eleven books because I simply can’t find anything else to keep my attention. In too many novels, the minutia of the character’s lives and their inane conversations seem to serve no purpose except to fill up the page. Oh, things do happen, but those doings aren’t worth suffering through those banal pages. Even the endings seem ho-hum, as if the authors themselves had lost interest.
I used to be able to read anything. Cereal boxes, ingredient lists, one-dimensional books, just . . . anything. I don’t know if the change was a result of all the time I spent reading and studying the multi-layered Wheel of Time, or if the change would have come anyway. Because of age maybe? Loss of patience for inanity?
Maybe I’m looking at the situation wrong. Maybe I should be grateful something keeps my attention, even if it’s a series I’ve read a half-dozen times before.
Or maybe I should settle down and try reading the Kingkiller Chronicle again. I’ve had the first two books in the Kingkiller Chronicle trilogy for some time now, but have never been able to get into it. From what I can tell, it’s another one of those series that people love because of the beautiful writing or hate because it’s poorly executed. Either way, they spend hours discussing the books online. Apparently, one of the major problems with the “trilogy” is that the author never wrote the final book, though some people think the writing is so great that it’s worth reading anyway. It’s a “framework” series, where the “frame” is the present day third-person story of an innkeeper, who tells stories of his past in the first person. I never did like that kind of book, and I really don’t like fantasy, but I have the books, so I might as well try again.
Unfortunately, since there is no ending, I can’t do my usual thing of reading the first part and skipping to the ending.
And if I can’t get into it, well, there’s always The Wheel of Time.
Or hey! I could write my own series about a tired old woman chosen to save the world from evil. Assuming that tired old woman cared — to write the books or to save the world, either one.
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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.
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