Writing at the Chronicle of Higher Education, novelist and literature Ph.D. William McMillen discusses the dubious pleasures of putting books down when you are half way through them. Making a virtue of settled fact--he now only finishes about half the books he starts--he writes with good humor and a rueful appreciation for the difficulty of sustaining attention in the modern age. Citing everything from the Internet to Books on Tape to bookstore coffee shops as factors in his readerly fickleness, he lays most of the blame squarely on doctoral training itself:

... if you were to force me to accept responsibility for having given up on reading books to the end, I would trace my habit back to finishing my doctorate in contemporary literature years ago. I realized then that except for books that I might teach or write about, I never had to finish another book unless I wanted to. I wasn't going to be tested on any book for the rest of my life. I was no longer competing to finish self-imposed reading lists with fellow graduate students. And I already had read more books by the age of 29 than most people read in a lifetime.

Still, that doesn't seem to be what McMillen is talking about. He seems to be talking about the naughty pleasure involved in simply dropping a book that is not holding one's attention. There is an honesty to that, and a freedom, and even a propriety, if we accept the premise that reading is a form of engagement, of imaginative connection, and that the moment a book becomes a chore--the moment leisure reading becomes slogging--there's no point anymore. He's right, of course.

An aside: That's one reason why teaching English is such a vexed enterprise. The whole business short circuits the student's ability to develop the habit of reading purposefully, imaginatively, and thoughtfully on his or her own. Of course it's still necessary, and of course it can model lively intellectual engagement, and of course when it works, students become lifelong readers who carve out their own meaningful canons. But it's vexed all the same. That's a topic for other posts at other times, though.

Among the books McMillen has put down lately: Pynchon's Vineland, Tom Brokaw's Boom!, Rob Gifford's China Road, Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, and Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian.

Among the books he's finished: Against the Day, also by Thomas Pynchon; Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin; The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, by Mark Haddon; The Thief at the End of the World, by Joe Jackson; and Protect and Defend, by Vince Flynn.

There is no real rule to it, McMillen notes. Pynchon appears on both lists. Length is not a factor in whether he finishes a book or not, nor is genre. Nor is there really any waste. Even the abandoned books were worthwhile; when they ceased to be, McMillen put them down.

I take his points. But I still really hate to quit on a book I've begun. I do feel guilt about putting a book down, and perhaps for that reason I have always been almost obsessive about choosing what I am going to read next. I want the book to be a good match for my interests and mood of the moment--and I don't want to have to put it down.

Right now, Thomas Flanagan's doorstop about the Irish Civil War, The End of the Hunt, is weighing down my bedside table and my conscience. I'm about half way through it. It's good. I love Flanagan's other novels. But I seem to have gotten sidetracked. Somewhere in there, I read Ian McEwan's The Cement Garden (now that is a creepy, creepy book), and then I got onto some Ivy Compton-Burnett (also not the right mood), and some John Banville (very much the right mood) ... and I don't seem to have picked the Flanagan up in weeks. Of course, now I'm done for. His work is so dense that you can't put it aside for any length of time and return to it. But I still have not declared it to be Put Down. I may not for awhile. It may gather dust for months, while I learn to look past it entirely.

So I'm not as free as McMillen. What gets in my way is a sense of obligation to the writer. Flanagan deserves better from me than I have given. And while I take McMillen's point, I'm not sure that's all bad.