A 'BookBook' pledge

For the past two weeks or more I have been failing to make any appreciable progress in my current read - and have resorted to keeping up the regularity of my postings on the BookBook review blog by writing about things I read on my summer holiday.

Now, it was not a good sign that this current book was so eagerly surrendered to me by my medical chum, The Egregious Dr P (one of the world's foremost 'gas men', no less), after he had failed to hack his way through much more than a quarter of it. I think his wife had tried and failed as well.

I hope I am not falling prey to the old vanity of feeling that I have to get through the bloody thing as some kind of obscure test of mental toughness, some measure of my self-worth. I thought I'd seen off all that nonsense long ago. I actually included as one of my 7 Habits of Highly Efficient Readers some months ago (one of my better and more provocative posts, I thought - although it continues to languish in neglect) that one should not be concerned about failing to finish books. There's a reason why you don't finish them: they're not good enough to hold your attention.

I would like to think that my perseverance with this one is driven by the quality of the writing; sometimes the flow of words alone is quite exhilarating to me. Unfortunately, in this case all of this fine writing seems to foster in me the persistent delusion that something is about to happen. But I'm half-way through now, and nothing has; and I'm rather beginning to doubt it ever will. Jeez, the author spent about 40 or 50 pages near the start of the book describing his protagonist's bicycle ride home through the Dublin suburbs. And that was action-packed stuff compared to the next 50 pages.

So, I've decided: long business trip this week, many hours in planes and hotels and airports - if I can't get the bugger finished this week, I'll toss it aside. And this weekend, BookBook will be treated to an account of what I thought of however much of it I've managed to get through.