What I’m not reading

It hasn’t happened very often, but I wanted to say a quick word about stopping reading a book.

If every writer alive stopped writing, there would still be more books than one person could possibly enjoyably read in a lifetime. I add the caveat ‘enjoyably’ because I know that there are readers out there who value quantity over the experience. For those who mindlessly munch the pages, who surreptitiously scan, or who read through speed reading apps, well, let’s just say that we may differ on what is enjoyable and leave it at that.

But when I read a book, I’m chasing a feeling I first got when I read Thinner by Stephen King.

When I finished that book, I sat there, stunned. While it wasn’t my first experience with existential dread (by the ripe old age of 14 when I read the book, I was already an old hand at that), it was the first time I felt my life divided in half: all that had come before that moment and who I would be from that moment on.

So whenever I pick up a book, that’s the feeling I’m chasing. I’m not 14 anymore, and very soon won’t be 41 anymore, but I believe that reading is the key to understanding the world as you see it through others’ eyes. And while I don’t get that feeling from every book I read, I often come away with some small understanding of something.

Smashcut to how I feel about HP Lovecraft.

It’s old hat to call him racist, which he most certainly was. The only reason why it’s even remotely acceptable to like Lovecraft is because he’s dead, and therefore can’t do any more damage. That being said, outside of some notable exceptions, I find most of his stories to be derivative of each other, essentially the same story with little variation. Which more or less sums up how I feel about his imitators.

I enjoyed the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. But one thing I don’t like about them is how cartoonish the character of Jack Sparrow becomes, even in the second movie. When you add in the characters of Tonto, the Mad Hatter, and Willy Wonka in their respective movies, it’s like a never-ending parade of studio executives said, “People really like Jack Sparrow; can you do that, but even more?” for 10+ years.

So when someone describes something as ‘Lovecraftian,’ I always cringe, wondering if they mean his innovation, his cosmic interpretation of horror, or his bloated narrative style. Don’t get me wrong, I understand that his narrative style was a product of his times. But modern writers trying to write in that style can’t seem to help but overdo it to the point of ridiculousness.

I wanted to like Thomas Ligotti. I really did. I always read and heard great things about his stories and was told that finding a copy of either Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe was a lucky find and I shouldn’t miss the opportunity.

After finishing Ghost Eaters and rocketing through Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke, I wasn’t ready to start the next book on my TBR. So I decided to pick my Ligotti collection back up, wondering why I’d put it down in the first place.

See, I had actually stopped reading it before. Apparently, I didn’t learn my lesson.

I remembered why after reading “The Sect of the Idiot.” I couldn’t remember a single detail about the story I’d just finished reading. A quick word about my memory: I have a really good one. Too good, if you’re asking my opinion. Not eidetic and for that I am very grateful. So to say that I read a story and did not have a single memory of it is a dire indictment for me to say.

Now, there’s the attitude that I agree with that there are no bad books, only books you don’t enjoy. Well, I didn’t enjoy Songs, so I’m stopping reading it. Life is too short to read stories you don’t enjoy.