I Have Reading OCD

   

 I am one of those lucky people who love to read.  I don’t mean just old magazines while I'm waiting in the doctor’s office, or the celebrity rags at the hair salon. (Though I LOVE those.)

     I genuinely love to read. Always have. I admit I was the pretentious kid who was reading Shakespeare in grade school, and thinking I understood it. I've always loved Salinger – except for “Catcher in the Rye.” Ptooey. Yuck.  How obnoxious and awful is Holden Caufield? I went to school with people just like him; I didn’t need to read his self-indulgent… oops, I digress.

     Anyway, you’d think that as much as I like to hide from the real world, I’d read a lot of fiction. You’d be wrong.  The thing is, while just about anyone can come up with an interesting idea that isn't enough.  Good fiction is really, really hard to write. Bad fiction, not so much.

     Nothing annoys me more than starting a book with a good premise and intriguing characters only to have it all fall apart halfway through. When that happens I’m pissed with the characters and furious with the writer for wasting my time.

     At this point a normal person would close the book and walk away. Not me. I have a weird tick where I absolutely cannot leave a book unfinished.

     Apparently I have reading OCD.  You know how people with regular OCD have to wash their hands a certain number of times, or check the lock on the door twice before leaving or they drive themselves crazy? That’s me with an unfinished book. I can’t ignore the unread pages.

     It’s like being in a bad relationship. I keep going back to the terrible book, knowing all the while that I’m going to be disappointed. I convince myself time and time again that it will get better. It never does.

     The latest example is the IT book of this season, ­City on Fire.  The story is very Bonfire of the Vanities,  (without the humor or  pizzaz), as it follows a group of characters through a moment in 80s era New York.

     Written by wonderkind Garth Risk Hallberg, it’s a first novel that netted the author something north of $2 million after a vigorous bidding war. With all that money invested, you’d think someone would have hired an editor to oversee the project. Again you’d be wrong. In fact, I’m pretty sure that the tome never went under a red pen.

    The City on Fire literally weighs in at Godzilla-like 700-plus pages. (I don’t know exactly; I bought it on by Kindle. The idea of schelpping a book that size around gave me pause.) But it’s not the length that forces me to put it away every night after just a few brief chapters. It’s the writing. It’s labored.

     When I was in school, I was always taught to aim for the brevity of Ernest Hemmingway. Mr. Hallberg must have missed that class. Where good ole’ Ernest was known be so tight with words that some chapters run barely a single page; Hallberg has never met a long flowery sentence he didn’t love. His descriptions run into tangents and he love, love, loves his SAT words.

     I love a good wordsmith, but constantly using terms that force me to constantly flip back and forth to a dictionary is lame and irritating. It not only takes me out of the story (which in this case is tangential enough without interruptions) but it’s condescending. We get it; you’re smart and know a lot of big words. Yay you.

     You get the point: I kind of hate this book. And yet, every night I chip away at it. I’m a fast reader, but I expect to be punishing myself with City on Fire for at least another month. Ugh.

     I love non-fiction. I ‘m convinced that just like a bad merlot is better than a bad cabernet, bad non-fiction better than bad fiction. It’s hard for even the worst writer to make fascinating people dull.  Even though god knows they try.

     Recently I’ve hit a vein of terrific non-fiction, some of which has even popular.  I’ll read anything from Bill Bryson (some is better than others), Jon Krakauer (don’t hold the film “Everest” against him) and Erik Larson (I never thought about the Lusitania or the world’s fair before his books). Those are just some of the great ones.

    I’ve also read terribly written, but really interesting books about flappers, stand-up comedy, Alan Turing, First Ladies, the Roosevelts, hummingbirds and rock and roll managers.  You get the drift.

Some of them were painfully bad.  All could have been made better with good editing. But they were still worth reading.  And yes, I finished them all.

     Currently I have a backlog of books waiting to be read, including some fiction.  I’m sure that by the time I finish slogging through City on Fire the list will be even longer.  According to my Kindle, I’m only 310 pages deep of 903. Which means I should be done sometime after the first of the year.