Reading Rubbish

During the pandemic, and indeed before all that, I have steadily read my way through the entire crime and thriller shelves of the local charity shops. Good ones, bad ones and mediocre ones; the books with pretentious quotations at the beginnings of sections that try in vain to rescue floundering prose; the books aimed at men, with feeble and vacuous female characters; the books aimed at women, with awful caricatured male leads.

I rarely abandon a book. It seems churlish after all the effort that a write has expended on plotting, writing and delivering, but I have learned to avoid certain writers. No Lynda la Plante, for instance: she is a Daily Mail Tory and her views are obnoxious, even filtered through made-up stories. There is another female writer whose name escapes me, who seems to write with a pen dipped in pure spite and who actually makes you feel grubby while you're reading her work.

There are writers who you wish could write twice as fast, although you know their books wouldn't be so carefully constructed if they did: Val McDairmid, Tara French, Ian Rankin and Mick Herron, for instance. And John Grisham manages to be educational as well as gripping; I feel as though I've learned a lot about the US political system and the way its entwined in dirty business from his books.

I have a revolving door-system: one in, one out. Or I thought that I did: the pile of 'I'm going to read this again' books seems to get higher every week.

Why am I writing this? I am three quarters of the way through book that is struggling to be interesting. None of the characters are engaging and I don't care what happens. Do I carry on to the end of the book just to experience book-time and a sense of completion, or do I give up and consign it to the 'back to the charity shop' pile? 

I had to get up early for the washing machine repairer (it's fixed now and burbling in the background), and the convalescing resident's not up yet. I haven't the energy for the half-finished album this morning, the coffee is disgusting (it's from year-old pack that turned up last week), and I need a break before starting work, which always spills over into not-work time.

OK, that's it. Finish the rubbish book, finish the coffee and start the day. A plus tard!