Abandoning Reads

I'm back! I took a trip last week to visit the family. As usual, I packed more than I could realistically read. Unfortunately, this particular time I seem to have packed some stinkers. It's hard to tell.

I used to be able to read through anything. I was the master at ignoring everything around me. I'm not sure when that began to change, but it has -- significantly. Airports and airplanes should be two of the best places to read. You spend so much time tied to one spot that the distraction of fiction (or non, depending on your taste) is a relief. I can't tune things out anymore, though. Walking traffic, unintelligible and garbled announcements, random pieces of conversations all around me... all of it invades my reading space.

I've had to seriously consider certain things in choosing traveling reads. Nothing too heavy or cerebral will do. Nothing that requires more than the absolute minimum concentration, in other words. And I did take this very seriously in choosing the four books I took along.

After zero progress reading en route, I arrived home. Now, normally we're spending time running around busy, busy, busy, but this trip was a little different. We're in the midst of the school year so all of my sisters were gone during the day. And my mom ended up having day surgery while I was in. I had hours in which to read all on my own. But... yeah.

I'm well aware that choosing the wrong book at the wrong time will heavily affect how I feel about the book. My sister had a couple of things I wanted to borrow that I refused to read because of this very thing. I set aside two books without even hitting the hundred page hurdle. One was a very popular book that I decided I just couldn't focus on at the time. The second was interesting, but the writing was a bit off and I couldn't see sticking with it for 400 pages.

Agh! I know plenty of readers out there who have come to terms with abandoning reads. I haven't gotten to that point. I have definitely been burned, expecting a book to redeem itself after sticking through to the end and finding that not to be the case. It's just so frustrating to devote any amount of time only to decide to give it up.

Oh well. I'm back. I'm reading a good one (actually the fourth book I brought along and never cracked open because of time spent on the others).

So what's up with you, fellow readers? What did I miss? Are you still hanging around after such a rambling post? I was disappointed to find that my few prepped posts for while I was gone never went up. I knew I was forgetting something :)