Halfway There

How many of you can put a book down without finishing it? This is a skill I have lost over the years. In high school and college, I left a large number of titles unfinished, even untouched! But now, even if I know a book is terrible, I generally have some strange compulsion to finish it. If I have to put a book down, it will clutter a corner of my mind with mental post-it notes nagging me to get back to it.

A couple of times a year I find myself searching desperately for a good piece of fiction to recommend in the magazine I work for, The Banner, and I end up reading bits and pieces. For one reason or another, certain books just aren't right, even if I like them, and I have to give them up to start something else. A couple of weeks ago I read about a quarter of The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer, which was (so far) about a young Jewish man who goes to school in Paris, leaving his home in Hungary behind, on the brink of World War II. For various reasons, it wasn't working for my purposes, but I was enjoying it and was very sorry to put it down.

Then there are the books that I read for book club but don't finish in time. I end up setting them on the shelf with a bookmark lodged in them against the day nothing else is calling for my attention (whenever that might be). Right now that encompasses The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, as well as a book the Fab 5 read about 3 years ago, Blowing My Cover by Lindsay Moran about her experience as a spy for the CIA. I'll even confess that I never actually read the last little bit of Chris Cleave's Little Bee, about a young Nigerian woman who flees illegally to England, in spite of the fact that the book was compelling, and I liked it! Since we talked about the ending at book club, and I skimmed through it pretty thoroughly, the urgency to read every last word has passed.

This week I'm feeling particularly bereft about a partly-read book. The Neland Women's Book Club is reading Mary Barton, the first novel by Elizabeth Gaskell, the same author who wrote Cranford (which was turned into a great PBS mini-series with Judi Dench). It's an old-fashioned tale, a book which would never see the light of day now with it's preachy undertones and strangely self-asserting omniscient narrator. But I'm enjoying it and have gotten very interested in what will happen to the title character. Unfortunately, I was using the library copy from the college I stayed at in Santa Fe, and I had to return it when I checked out. I was about halfway when I slid it into the book return.

Here's the truly awful part. I only have a week and a couple of days left to read it. The Grand Rapids Library system has one whole copy, which some other Nelander has no doubt squirreled away on her shelf. Schuler's Books didn't have it, and no bookstore in Santa Fe appears to have a copy. So even though I have time and would like to finish it, at this point I have no copy to read!

Books come alive in my imagination, and a half-read book leaves a lonely ghost haunting the back stairways and storage rooms of my mind. What books are haunting you?