Quite a failure rate

I sometimes overlook Maud Newton, wholly unintentionally, but I rely heavily on rss feeds to prompt me to read new posts on my favourite blogs and the site doesn't offer them, so last night I was catching up on a couple of week's posts over there and found this astonishing aside: "These days I abandon 95% of the books I start before page 50."

Surely 95% must be an exaggeration?  At the rate of one book read, in full, per week that means trying and giving up on an additional 19 books in the same week.  How does she fund such a habit?  Either she's a millionaire, lives very close to the library, gets a lot of freebies from publishers or is in extreme debt.  Or perhaps she doesn't actually ever finish a book.  No!  Please say it ain't so.  And what is it that's she's picking up in the first place that is so unreadable?

I am truly puzzled and I have to say that if my rejection rate were that high I'd probably give up reading altogether.  Happily that's not happening and I was up late reading Isaac Newton: the Last Sorcerer last night.   "For several years before he touched a crucible or tended a furnace, Newton buried himself in the literature and the lore of the subject, in order to develop some form of intellectual foundation for the discipline."  In those days books were far too precious to be discarded part-read. 

Comments

[Max]

Maud does have a feed. It's just hard to find:

http://www.maudnewton.com/blog/wp-rss2.php

Interesting about the "failure rate." I hope she elaborates on that.

[Sandra]

Max you're a genius! (or I'm an ill-informed Luddite and you're too polite to say) Either way thanks for the feed address.

[iliana]

Wow, I would love to hear why too. I wonder if it's just so many books vying for her attention.

[Maud]

Hi Sandra. Thanks for your comments. I agree with you: it's an astonishingly high failure rate. But these days, I just won't stick with books that aren't working for me. Sometimes I'll return to them later and not be able to figure out why I had such a hard time in the first place. Some of them I put down just because I find something else that really engages me.

I probably read more than a book a week, on average. It's probably more like two or three. And I probably take a look at 40 - 50, total. Lots of these are galleys from publishers -- many of which I can dispense with after looking at them for a few minutes -- but some are hand-me-downs from friends, or used books I've picked up in bookstores or ordered online.

I often wonder whether I've just become a terrible curmudgeon with very narrow tastes (not impossible). Maybe it's just that I'm being bombarded with tons of contemporary novels that don't appeal to me. (I'm not complaining, though. I like getting free books, and sometimes I find great things among the galleys.)

I should also mention that I'm trying to write a book of my own, and I've been very mindful since interviewing A.L. Kennedy of something she said about her reading habits while writing: "I ... can’t read anything sloppy, because all of my thinking is towards trying to polish and tinker - so I need to read people who present no opportunity for me to pick up faults."

[Maud]

I also meant to say that, in the post you mention, I was pining for a very specific kind of manic reading experience that happens for me maybe ten times a year now rather than every few days, as it did when I was a child. I can't think of many writers whose books would keep me standing at the bus stop after midnight on a weeknight, desperate to get to the end, heedless of work the next day and all the other sorry obligations of adulthood.

[Lee]

Maud, mostly it's good YA novels that have the 'midnight oil' effect on me now. Even James Lasdun or Rupert Thomson, my current favourites, can't keep me from sleep.

[Kate S.]

That A.L. Kennedy quotation is wonderful. When I'm mid-draft I tend to avoid anything that's too close, either in form or content, to what I'm attempting lest it prove an overshadowing influence. I hadn't thought about picking up faults from sloppy writing but it makes good sense to avoid that possibility as well.

[Maud]

Lee, it was Rupert Thomson who kept me reading at the bus stop in the middle of the night, with all the buses passing! Somehow I got the impression early-on that his first few novels weren't as good as the later ones. And then I started "Air and Fire" last week. I could quibble with a few of his choices, but overall I. loved. it.

And Kate, I'd taken a number of writing classes, and been exposed to reams of truly, truly abysmal writing, so I'd thought a little bit about the problem of my own prose being infected by crappy, or just very different, writing. But it wasn't until Kennedy said what she did that I realized: oh, I'm not crazy. It really reconfirmed my decision to quit the graduate writing program I'd embarked on at City College.

[mai wen]

wahoo, I've been looking for the rss feed for maud's blog as well and couldnt' find it! thanks max! as for me, I sometimes have to go through a couple of books before I can settle into, and I don't have a rhyme or reason for it either. For example, I tried twice to get into She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb and just couldn't then the third time I tried years later I adored the book and couldn't get out of it! it usually takes me nearly a day, or at least a couple of hours, of reading the first couple of pages of books to decide which one will be my next read.

[Lee]

Yeah, Maud, Thomson's wonderful. There's always stuff to quibble about - it's part of what makes good fiction idiosyncratic.