Another thing we don't talk about much when it comes to books and reading is how almost all readers finally arrive at one crucial and telling moment, one that changes their reading styles forever after — that instant when you realise you aren't going to finish the book you are diligently ploughing through, and you don't have to finish it, and you can fling it off the porch with a sigh of relief.
Such a fling does not mean you are an ignoramus, and in fact a book's unfinishability reflects less on the reader than on the writer, even on such otherwise excellent writers as, for example, James Joyce, whose Dubliners is taut and perfect and whose Finnegan's Wake is, let us admit cheerfully here in public, unreadable muck.
Almost every reader achieves this moment of maturity, it seems to me, and it is a remarkably freeing line to step over — to finally give up on reading all of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and realise happily that now you have years more to live, or, after two volumes of Marcel Proust, to say politely, 'Marcel, you are a wheezing neurotic nut, and I wish you the best, but I'd like to read books where things actually happen', or even to say to the genius Henry James, 'Hank, old pup, your infinitesimal gradations of social manners are incredibly boring, and reading your denser novels is like being drilled by a very slow dentist.' Isn't that a refreshing feeling?
There are, of course, many books in which slogging pays off wonderfully — Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, say, or Tolstoy's War and Peace, both of which demand maybe a hundred pages of patient muddling before they explode into such vast tremendous stories that you are, at the end, loath to leave their extraordinary worlds.
And there are many books, such as Cervantes' Don Quixote or Melville's Moby-Dick, that are so huge and sprawling and labyrinthine that you are as pleasantly addled at the end as you were at the beginning, which is perhaps why you reread them with joy every few summers.
And there are books that are hard to read but riveting and unforgettable, and it would have been a real shame not to have played in their intense game, books like Annie Dillard's For the Time Being, or Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom, or Tim Winton's Cloudstreet, or David