Friday, February 11, 2011

Nancy Pearl’s Rule of 50 for dropping a bad book

Nancy Pearl,  Globe and Mail, Friday, Feb. 04, 2011
I was raised in a family in which the dictum “Finish what you start” was the 11th commandment. This stricture was applied in almost every conceivable situation, whether it was eating my father’s lovingly (I’m sure) prepared soft-boiled eggs for breakfast (yuck!, way too runny for me), keeping up my elementary-school clarinet lessons long after the limits of my modest musical talent had been reached, or sticking it out at a college that, while it had been my first choice, had clearly proved to be the wrong one.


So it was only natural that when it came to reading, I simply took it for granted that virtue required that I slog through any book I started, whether it was William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (a hated Grade 10 reading assignment) or Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (I loved the beginning, but got bored with all the woo-woo philosophy about two-thirds of the way through).

Mine was also a family of readers, with a house full of books, and my childhood library was virtually a second home to me, so I certainly didn’t lack for choices in my early reading life. But to my way of thinking back then, I had to finish the book I was reading, even if I already knew that I didn’t especially like it, before I could start another one, one that I might love.

It wasn’t until I became an adult, and a librarian, that I began to question my commitment to finishing each and every book that I began. Now that I really was living a major portion of my life in the library, I literally found myself surrounded by books, tempting me, calling to me from the shelves. How could I – in one lifetime – ever get through everything I wanted to read if I had to finish those books that I discovered to be (at least to me) boring, badly written or just plain bad?
 
Do be sure to read the rest here. It is great fun, and good adavice too I reckon.
 
 
Nancy Pearl is a librarian, critic, radio commentator and author of Book Lust. She is also the only librarian with her own action figure!





1 comment:

Gavin McLean said...

Nancy's action figure staffs my library. A few years ago, when I shared a cruise ship gig with her she told me that shortly after her doll came out, the manufacturer rang to say that 'Nancy, you've outsold Jesus!'(another star in his range).