Recently I forced myself to finish reading Peter Temple’s Truth, it wasn’t for me. It is a thriller with really good Goodreads ratings. It was for our OG bookclub and I had been looking forward to it. Thriller writers seem to reference Peter Temple as a master and Truth seemed to me a classic of the genre. I tried so hard initially to get into it. I must have started it a million times over, thinking I just wasn’t trying. Once I ran out of time to keep doing that I just sat there and read it. Expecting at any second I was going to fall into the story. But I just didn’t. I was very conscious of how many pages I had left, how far I was before I would be done. I just had it as a chore to tick off.
I got to attend our bookclub with a clear conscious, but actually not much to say. In the end I hadn’t really paid attention to the character development, or the nuances of the story. I had actively so disliked the novel in the end I was reading the sentences rather than chapters. I hadn’t connected with anyone, I couldn’t even articulate what I didn’t like about the book.
Am I glad I pushed myself? This year I’ve been lucky enough to have read over one hundred books, I can afford to try new things. I might have really enjoyed it. I’ve also got a really well developed habit of reading, I know one bad book is not going to change the fact I am a reader. I can certainly finish a book and not have loved it and be reasonably confident that the next one I pick up I will. And it was a bookclub book, although there isn’t anything binding obviously, I do feel I owe it to the member that picked it in the first place.
But I did know from the first 50 pages that it wasn’t for me. I really didn’t need to keep going back to the start. Really I did waste quality reading time on a book I knew wasn’t for me. And I wasn’t reading it properly in the end anyway, I honestly seem to have just been reading the words!
So next time I’m reading a book that isn’t for me I’m going to stop. I just need to trust myself that I can tell the difference between being a lazy reader and the book just not being for me! Does every reader have these same issues? What do you do when faed with a book that just isn’t your jam?
