Last week's Booking Through Thursday.....

.....otherwise known as, "Hey I'm So Far Behind I Have My Choice of Lots of Questions!"

I would enjoy reading a meme about people’s abandoned books. The books that you start but don’t finish say as much about you as the ones you actually read, sometimes because of the books themselves or because of the circumstances that prevent you from finishing. So . . . what books have you abandoned and why?

I abandon books all the time. As I grow older, and my childhood dream of reading every single book in the entire world recedes further and further into the distance, I find that I have less patience for books than I once had. Don't get me wrong. I love lots of different kinds of books, and a book doesn't have to grab me by the arm and rush me through the revolving door immediately to be worth my time.

But.

I can pick up a book and know that it is simply not the right book for me at the time within the first 30 pages or so.

And it has more to do with me than it has to do with the book.

Times have been a little tough around the MamaT household. Nothing major wrong. Just a whole host of little problems/concerns/nits to pick that have conspired to destroy my peace and normally stable personality. Because of that, the books I am choosing to read are lighter--there's a lot more Georgette Heyer and a lot less Flannery O'Connor.

I actually had Flannery's Everything That Rises Must Converge on my Fall Reading List. I read the first story in the book. It was genius. Complete genius. But it made me want to dive under my covers and cry my eyes out or, more likely, drown my sorrows in a pint of Ben and Jerry's.

So, that book is abandoned. For now.

And that's the key. A book rarely stays abandoned forever in my world. I can only think of ONE book that I have thrown away without finishing in the last 10 years. And that was One Hundred Years of Solitude. I had simply had it up to here with magical realism and could read no more. Even now I feel guilty about the abandonment, and the book'll probably wend its way back onto my "to read" shelves.