I do that a lot too. I start to read something that I'm interested in momentarily then a few weeks later I find something different that I'm interested in and want to read about, so I abandon one book and move on to another.

I do this a lot. My library is full of books in progress. I've stopped worrying about it.

First I saw it as a failure on my part. (I tend to see everything this way, but that's another topic...). Then I saw it as a failure on the part of the author, at least vis-à-vis me: this particular book just wasn't for me; find another. While this is true in some cases, I've come to realize that most of the time it's something else altogether. My mind is always at work - intellectual, artistic, whatever; it's always on a treasure hunt. And, like so much of our mental processing, the real work is subconscious. To paraphrase Russell Hoban, I've become friends with my mind; we've known one another a long time. When my mind needs something for its treasure hunt, it'll tell me, on its own schedule, and I've learned to pay attention to those impulses. There's nothing woo-ish about this; I should make that clear. I've simply noticed that when I don't do this, I'm not as happy, productive, creative, or simply engaged. So I've learned to get out of my own way.

Or think about it like this. Why do you choose to read a particular book? Unless there's a really obvious external reason (e.g., it's necessary for a class), most of us follow our instincts. You hear about or read about some book and think "hey, that sounds interesting." This is the point: something about where your mind is at that moment is ripe for your interest to be caught. Well, why should those moments come only in between books? Why can't it come in the middle of one?

There is, of course, a lot to be said for reading a book uninterrupted, as most authors intend. After all, we wouldn't chop up listening to a piece of music like this. (At least I wouldn't.) Music is a temporal art; once you violate that aspect, it loses a lot of its meaning. And reading is a temporal activity too, though (and this is crucial) - to a lesser extent. It's more loosely bound to the flow of time; you the reader can set your own pace. In most prose, you can press "pause", as it were, and pick up the thread later. (I don't find this works with poetry, though. Poetry - at least if it's good - is more like music; it sets its own pace.)

So the upshot is that I'm always reading about five to ten books. It's like a cloud of books and I'm always in the middle of it. I go from one to another, following my mind's lead. Very often, the books all relate in some way that may or may not be obvious to an outsider (or even to me, initially). They illuminate one another. The experience of reading each is enhanced by the interleaved reading of the others. And most eventually get finished. As they do, they disappear from the cloud (often to reappear later). But by then another book has joined the conversation. So this cloud never disperses, but always shifts. And I've been in the middle of it as long as I can remember. It's actually a nice place to live.

There is one book I should mention, though: Alain Robbe-Grillet's 1965 novel La Maison de Rendez-vous. Like many of Robbe-Grillet's works, it's rather short (153 pages in Richard Howard's excellent English translation). In a way it's a very simple story of crime and intrigue set in Hong Kong. But also like many of Robbe-Grillet's novels, it circles back on itself, repeats (never quite the same way, though). Wikipedia's description isn't far off the mark:

Wikipedia wrote:Methodical, geometric, and often repetitive descriptions of objects replace (though often reveal) the psychology and interiority of the character. The reader must slowly piece together the story and the emotional experience of jealousy, for example, in the repetition of descriptions, the attention to odd details, and the breaks in repetitions, a method that resembles the experience of psychoanalysis in which the deeper unconscious meanings are contained in the flow and disruptions of free associations. Timelines and plots are fractured, and the resulting novel resembles the literary equivalent of a cubist painting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Robbe-Grillet#Style

For the purpose of this thread, the fracturing of timelines and plot is the crucial thing. Here, the process is fantastically complex. It's also insidious - you often don't realize it's happening. And the "puzzle" doesn't actually add up. I once tried to map the timeline and plot on paper as I read it, and I found it was impossible; the story is subtly but deliberately self-contradictory.

What I've found with all Robbe-Grillet's novels (and his films, too, for he was an astonishingly original screenwriter/director), is that it must be read in one go. You can press pause, but not for too long. And reading anything else disrupts the experience utterly. It's odd; you would think that with something that fractured, that non-linear (to use today's buzzword), the continuity of reading would matter less. But I think it's just the opposite: Robbe-Grillet has "pre-fractured" our reading experience in an exquisitely crafted and artistically satisfying way that makes sense on its own terms. It's not bound to the flow of time as is music or poetry, but it is in some other strange way. What's clear is that further fracturing on my part kills it.

And maybe it's something perverse in my own psychology, but I've never been able to finish the damned thing. And yet it's still got hold of me. It fascinates me, I find it deeply beautiful, and so I keep coming back to it for my usual ritual of getting a good way into it and then stopping. I really don't know why this is. If I was a more profound thinker I'd speculate that I'm subconsciously trying to mimic the fractured, repetitive, formal, ritualistic style of the novel itself. But I'm not, so I won't.

Animavore wrote:No one has finished War and Peace. I think I only read the first book of ten

I've read it, a few times. I'm lame, I mean cool like that.

I always finish books once I open it. It's a curse. Once I read a Rush Limbaugh book I found on the ground (before I knew who he was, so I didn't even know what to expect! What a shock!) Afterwards I went to the gym and stayed there for six hours and then went home and wrote him like a 500 page reply, then went running for two hours. I was so pissed off.

I do read like 20 books at a time and so sometimes it is like I half read them for awhile.

Animavore wrote:No one has finished War and Peace. I think I only read the first book of ten

I finished it but I skipped lots of the 'War' bits because they bored me. I can claim to have read 'Peace' by Tolstoy.

NB re W&P: the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation is superb. (Also, they keep the French passages intact, with translations in footnotes. Rather important.)

I am fairly obsessive about finishing books when I have started them - this is part of a larger trend of being obsessive about finishing things once I have started them. However there is one book which I did give up on half way through: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sad-Tale-Brothers-Grossbart/dp/1841497835/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1305411424&sr=8-1 I was lured in by the cover and I thought it sounded pretty cool. And it actually went fine at first, and then I just got incredibly bored with it for no apparent reason. I may or may not get back to it at some point.