Some time ago (the fall has been such a blur that I don't remember when), I did something I very rarely do: I stopped reading a book that I was partway through. It was Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn #3: To Green Angel Tower, Volume I by Tad Williams. The book is divided into volumes because Williams was so insistent upon making the series a trilogy to the point that he wrote a third book so lengthy that it had to be split into two volumes in paperback. You can imagine, therefore, that reading this book requires a lot of investment in the story. Even as a singular volume, the book is massive!
Well, I'm simply not invested enough. Anymore.
I started the series in eighth grade, back when I had so much time to read that even mediocre books seemed worthwhile. Moreover, I did not find The Dragondone Chair to be mediocre at all. Sure, a few issues tugged at the back of my mind--the lack of female characters, the vague but persistent cultural stereotyping--but otherwise, I loved it. The plot intrigued me (and I still maintain that it isn't bad), the languages fascinated me. I could see the world Williams wrote, and it was beautiful. So I happily read the first two books within several months of each other. The first volume of To Green Angel Tower was a Christmas gift that same year, along with many other books. That's when a deadly combination of homework and podcasts hit. Suddenly I had almost no time at all to read for fun. To give you an idea of how little time I have to read now, I received To Green Angel Tower December 2015 and I didn't start reading it until August 2017 (I read books in roughly the order I acquire them). At that point, I was quite grateful for the synopsis of the previous two books included at the beginning of To Green Angel Tower, but I wondered what I would do when I finally got around to reading the next volume. Would there be a synopsis of part one in part two? I wasn't sure about that. Fortunately, I don't think that's something I have to worry about anymore.
In the intervening year and seven months, I had lost my taste for the world of Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn. As much as I love a complex plot and a vast fantasy world, I simply no longer have the time or the energy to wade through any of that unless everything about the book is so compelling that I actually want to have time to read it. To Green Angel Tower didn't capture me that way, so I put it down.
The sentence at the top of this post is more or less what I told my piano teacher at my first lesson after I decided to put down To Green Angel Tower. I relayed to her this new direction in my reading life, and she, not being much of a fantasy reader, asked me what I meant by "classic fantasy." "In the tradition of J. R. R. Tolkein" was not particularly helpful for her, since she'd never read anything by him. (And I've only read half of The Hobbit, which I put down in sixth grade when the amount of traveling through the forest with liberal use of deus ex machina became too much for even time-rich 12-year-old me.) So I explained it roughly how I did at the beginning of this post. She loved that description. I remembered it as best as I could for my eventual In Which Much Concerns Words gentle rant on this event, which I knew I would write at some foggy point in the future.
So classic fantasy is basically a bunch of straight white men in fake medieval Europe with swords and magic and maybe there's a dragon. To Green Angel Tower is classic fantasy. Also, 14-year-old me, Williams' conlangs (constructed languages) aren't all that great. Hernystiri is some fake mashup of Irish and Welsh. They may be Celtic languages, but Irish is Goidelic and Welsh is Brythonic and their phonologies work together so terribly that a conlang of the two is a full mess. Also, how dare Tad Williams try to tell me to pronounce Hernystiri mostly like English. I'm a Celtic-language nerd. When creative license sets on edge the teeth of people who know a little about the thing that the creator is taking license with, it's a bit not good (as some character, can't remember who, says in Sherlock).
I stopped reading To Green Angel Tower because it didn't interest me anymore. I suppose classic fantasy doesn't interest me anymore. As I have grown up and changed perspectives--and started working hard on world-building for my own series that is classic fantasy but subverts as many tropes as I can afford to subvert--I've come to no longer enjoy books like To Green Angel Tower. And that's okay. It's one thing for dozens of people to tell you over and over again that really, it's fine to stop reading a book if you don't like it. It's another thing to actually understand the truth in that. I had to get seriously bored and pressed for time first, but I did it. I put down a book that I didn't enjoy anymore. The world didn't fall apart, I didn't become less smart, and I don't miss Simon Snowlock (epitome of straight white male privilege) and his merry band of straight white men/culturally-stereotyped straight men of color. Nor does it bother me that I will likely never finish a convoluted, lengthy series into which I initially invested a lot of time and energy. Sure, it was a little scary to make the decision to stop reading it; I only felt better once I reminded myself that I could always come back to it. Now, almost two months later, I haven't touched the book, and everything is still okay.
Everything is more than okay, in fact. Putting down To Green Angel Tower enabled me to start The Golem and the Jinni by Helen Wecker (which--gasp!--was not even the very next book in my stack!). I absolutely love it. I'm still only halfway through it because boy oh boy junior year sure is a busy one. But I'm on break now, so hopefully I'll be able to read a significant amount of it within the next two weeks. The Golem and the Jinni has been the perfect read after my first time putting down a book that I'd invested a lot in. It has also been a refreshing antidote to two months of by-the-book classic fantasy.
I'm free, y'all! Well, I've been free for a couple of months, but now I have the time to inform the world of my freedom! I am old enough and busy enough to fully understand that putting down books is okay.
Are you currently reading a book that is weighing on your soul? Put it down! Our time is not infinite. Even if we only read books we loved, we'd probably never manage to read everything we wanted to by the time of our deaths. Of course, if that soul-crushing book is required for school or work, there's not much you can do about that. But don't infiltrate your personal-enjoyment reading time with books that are not personally enjoyable! Put it down now. Remember you can always come back to it. But try something else first. Try The Golem and the Jinni, if creative women authors and supernatural creatures in Gilded-Age New York interest you. Try something very different, if that also sounds soul-crushing. For suggestions, I recommend the podcast Reading Glasses, whose very first episode is about how to get out of a book slump.
Enjoy your holidays, everyone. I'll be back someday.