Are you a non-finisher? A literary tease who picks up books on street corners and then discards them on page 45 without so much as a follow-up text? Are your shelves a sea of protruding bookmarks? Alan Bissett's are, and his entertaining recent blog drew attention to the perils of multi-stimuli multimedia intruding on our reading time and making it impossible to reach an end.
This is not my problem. As Bissett conceded, it's not actually a question of there being no time to read, it's a question of how you choose to spend your time – and I choose to spend a great deal of mine in the company of books. My problem is different. In fact, it's a problem that makes me jealous of Bissett and his kind. Mine is more of a psychosis; a kind of reverse literary Stockholm syndrome in which, instead of forming an attachment to my captor, I am held hostage to the sources of my enmity.
It goes like this. I read the first few pages of a book, I can't quite get into it, but I struggle on until I'm a third of the way through and after that I simply have to reach the final page. It's not exclusive to novels. It's not even just to find out what happens. I think it's more compulsive than that: something to do with being assured that I've actually read the damn thing and not wasted my time on only some of it.
I'm currently wading through Hothouse by Brian Aldiss, an extremely promising-sounding dystopian novel set in a future dominated by savage plants and insects. (It shares characteristics with Avatar's Pandora, but isn't nearly as compellingly evoked – which makes me eager to see what James Cameron will come up with, if he follows through on his threat to write a Pandora prequel.) The problem is I don't think it's much cop (too eager to explain, too vividly laboured), but that isn't going to stop me.
The refusal to admit defeat is partly born of necessity. As a reviewer, I don't have the option of not finishing books (the least I can do is read every word – especially if I'm then going to be unkind). But the compulsion is just as prevalent in my leisure reading. I often have several unfinished books sitting by my bed, staring at me accusingly. I don't have the will to put them away until I've finished them. It's a sort of a pact: master me and I will release you. Maybe I hate the idea of missing out on some wonderful potential saving grace in the last sentence. Maybe I've got an unhealthily acquisitive relationship with culture. Maybe I'm just a bit weird.
This syndrome (Obsessive conclusion disorder?) is all the more exasperating when I think of how few books we get to read in a lifetime. 3,000? 4,000? And that's for bookaholics. It doesn't feel like many.
It's got to the stage where I'm afraid to read the opening pages of a book for fear of getting sucked into the relationship. A page is fine, maybe two (with a bit of a skim), but more than that and I might have to commit. I've lost count of the number of times I've read the opening of Ulysses. "Stately, plump ..." (brilliant!); that bit about the absurd names as he lathers his cheeks (wonderful!); then I put it down. Don't get involved unless you're going to follow through.
Trilogies and series make me anxious. I've read three volumes of In Search of Lost Time – and loved them – but the remainder weigh heavily on my conscience. So, too, do the few books I've somehow managed to wriggle away from. Two stand out in my adult life: Money by Martin Amis and Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie – both classics of the late 20th-century canon, which, perversely, I gave up on with around 50 pages to go (and I'm someone who bothered to read The Information twice). I had my reasons, but the thought of those unfinished final chapters fills me with unease. I've probably spent more time worrying about them than it would take to read them. In fact, I can't bear it any longer. Now where did I hide them ...?
