Reader's Block or Goldilocks looks for a book

Is it possible to have reader's block in the same way that authors encounter writer's block?  I'm convinced that it is.  I absolutely cannot find the right book to read.  Perhaps a week reading nothing but Shakespeare has ruined everything else forever. 

Lat night I tried to make some progress with Downriver.  I managed six pages and it felt like sixty.  I'm at the stage I always reach eventually with Iain Sinclair: I have so comprehensively lost any grip on the plot that I am now reading each page as a self contained unit in a narrative vacuum.  Very post modern, no? It may as well be a B S Johnson unbound novel assembled in random order.  I know that this is a terrible insult to the author because when I went to one of his readings he specifically said that there is a firm structure to his writing.  I knew when I started that I should have made notes on each chapter and section in order to have any chance of discerning the plot, structure or themes in the dazzling, head-turning, infatuation engendered by each individual sentence.  I'm half way through and really not sure if I can stay the course. 

Then I turned to One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson.  I had enjoyed Case Histories and this novel takes a couple of the protagonists from that novel and sends them on a mystery tour to Edinburgh.  Normally I find Kate Atkinson almost too easy to read, but this one is driving me mad too.  She insists on piling on tons of information about every character, even down to the stencilling in their downstairs loo.  Some of it is funny and neatly character spearing, but there is just so much of it.  Also she has a stylistic tic of interrupting the third person description of what's going on, with a third person narration of the thoughts going through the character's mind in a sort of rambling, not quite stream of consciousness way.  But then when the character thinks a question, the person they are with will answer it, as if it had been spoken.  I just can't get into the book at all.

I did manage to finish Peter Ackroyd's Isaac Newton: A Brief Life, and that was vaguely unsatisfying too.  It just read like a condensed version of Michael White's Isaac Newton: the Last Sorcerer.

So with no fiction I really wanted to read, I prowled the bookshelves like Goldilocks looking for a book, sampling everything and finding nothing that was just right.  So I gave up on fiction and ended up with the chapter on Romeo and Juliet from Marjorie Gerber's Shakespeare After All.  Which actually turned out to be perfect: full of insight and appreciation, with no academic jargon or posturing. 

Unfortunately, though that still leaves me at a loose end this evening.  I think I shall just have to give up and read yesterday's newspapers instead. 

Comments

[Susan]

Couldn't you simply continue on with Shakespeare? You could read The Taming of the Shrew with my son and me. :)

I pre-ordered the Atkinson last week so I hate hearing that you're not enjoying it.

[Sandra]

Hmm, I am thinking that some more Shakespeare would be soothing, but The Tempest is absolutely top of my list. Can you believe I've never read it? I can't.

And as for One Good Turn, it's absolutely not the book, it's my fidgetty mood. I should put it down and come back to it when I'm in the mood to enjoy it, but because it's a library book and there's a queue of people breathing down my neck to get their hands on it, I feel pressured into reading it. Maybe I'll return it and reserve it again later!

[Susan]

The Tempest is great fun. That's definitely the way to go.

It never fails. When I check books out from the library I always want to read the one that doesn't have a lot of people waiting for it first, which of course defeats the whole purpose of reserving new books. I don't know if this is sheer contrariness on my part--keep the others waiting--but this reluctance to start them makes me rush through them even more once I do.

[Papyrus]

Yes, it's strange how that can happen sometimes. I'm currently having trouble with a novel I'd been wanting to read for ages and could hardly wait to start it. But I'm finding it very tough going - not because it's bad, it's just me and my current moods I guess. I actually put it down for a while and read two other books, and now I want to take it up again. We'll see.

[Victoria]

I very much recommend Kate Grenville's The Secret River if you're looking for something that is a) easy to read but b) moving and insightful. :-) Or just settle down with the Bard and let the block disappate on its own.

[iliana]

Definitely possible. Sometimes the only thing that gets me out of that reader's block funk is reading something absolutely silly - like a celebrity gossip magazine.

[Max]

Reader's block is such a pain! Especially when you have something to read that you know should be great, but you can't settle down with it.

[Michael Lawrence]

I'm a children's author. In 2003, while doing a turn or two at the literary end of the Edinburgh Festival, I asked a panel of writers and their audience (adult) if anyone else suffered from reader's block. Everyone stared at me in amazement. A few chuckled or giggled. Questions were asked. No one had ever heard or imagined such a condition. I explained that after a lifetime of never going anywhere without a book - preferably a novel - I had of late found almost all fiction impossible to enjoy. Sadly, this sorry situation holds to this day. There are so many novels and stories that I want to read, but upon starting them I rarely get beyond the first paragraph, often skidding to a halt before the end of the first line, bored to distraction. I frequently spend an hour in a bookshop, intent on finding something to read, and come out empty-handed. I can’t even re-read books that I loved in my youth!

I don't blame the books. My inability to get into them is not their fault, or the fault of their authors (mostly). Something has happened to my brain since I started earning my living from words (my first novel came out in 1995, since when I’ve published eleven more and a host of other books for kids of various ages). I fiddle constantly with my own writing, turning sentences around, switching words, playing with meaning, nuance, and so on. I even do this on final proofs when they arrive, driving my editor mad - and I hate to read my own printed books because I always find errors, or bits that I feel could have been done better.

It’s rather like that when I look at other people’s work. Their phrasing or choice of words bothers me, their punctuation seems flawed, their dialogue weak, too obvious, absurdly obscure… and yet, quite possibly, none of this is true. Most of my reading these days is non-fiction, primarily biographies and autobiographies. I can read such books easily, finding fewer faults than pernickety reviewers often do. But there’s a lingering guilt. All those brilliant works of fiction out there and my peculiar brain can’t handle them. It’s tragic really. I’m clearly a hopeless case. Hypnotherapy: is that the answer?