Why We Abandon Books

They have multiplied across my nightstand, and the stack is growing. Sticky notes, a pencil, junkmail postcards, and a receipt work as placeholders.

I actively read three to four books. I read a few pages from each book every night or switch from book to book. I have plenty of other reading friends who keep disciplined systems like these, sometimes with up to ten books.

Unfortunately, I started four books in December and have not returned to them since. Can I blame my attention in a distracted age? Certainly. Did I spend a lot of late night hours visiting instead of reading? You bet, but a few months have now passed. Is a book or two ready for the fatal Did-Not-Finish pile? Also a possibility. But I wonder if it’s something else that leads me to lay aside certain books.

Here are two examples. For a decade, I have wanted to read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel, from 1920, This Side of Paradise. I’ve taught many of Fitzgerald’s short stories and The Great Gatsby countless times. I might never find a character to truly cheer for in his work, but that is my opinion of course and also not the point of fiction. My margin notes and lines and boxes of every color reveal how I’ve learned and reflected on Fitzgerald’s works over the years as I taught them. I relish so much of his style and phrasing while I can also appreciate his critical eye of American society. Yet I stopped halfway through his instant bestseller. I don’t like Amory. I have left him at age twenty in the middle of Princeton in chapter 3, and I’m not sure I care enough to read more. I feel a certain stubbornness or maybe ambivalence. . . 

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