Reading failures

I’ve been on a real losing streak lately in my ability to engage with a book. It’s happened with so many that I have an uneasy feeling it’s because of me, not the books. (Sure sign of a book geek: the implication of moral failure associated with decreased reading…)

Here are some I’ve tried and failed to finish:

• Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet: Full of quotable but often impenetrable (and occasionally quite misguided) ideas.
• Trollope, The Way We Live Now: Typical Victorian novel that requires patience. This one is said to provide insight into today’s American culture by focusing on a rather shallow, self-involved, materialistic 19th-century British one, but it will have to wait for a different season.
• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The White Company: I thought I loved knights and castles, but I’ve tried twice with this one and it doesn’t seem to find and adhere to my alleged “love.”
• Pyle, King Arthur and His Knights: See remarks on previous two entries, and weave them together.
• Sue Hubbell, A Country Year: A reread — a woman’s account of her life as a beekeeper in the Ozarks. This is natural history, and I liked it but found that when I put it down about a third of the way through, I had no impulse to pick it back up.
• C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: Lewis’s erudite treatise on Medieval and Renaissance literature. I really enjoy this glimpse into Lewis in his area of expertise, and the weight of his reading and knowledge are quite dazzling. I will continue this in small bites until I finish it, but I don’t have the concentration to keep it as the only book on my plate right now.
• Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby: No complaints, really, other than that I can read it for days (and days) and the progress bar on the Kindle doesn’t move at all.

On the other hand, I’m enjoying the books I’m reading aloud to the girls. I’m enjoying my daily dip into My Utmost for His Highest, A Diary of Private Prayer, and the New Testament. Based on Amy’s mention of Spiritual Depression on her blog, I started reading it on impulse and am finding it a thought-provoking read. And I’m about halfway through March, Geraldine Brooke’s novel about the shadowy father-figure in Little Women.

I will find my stride again. I will. But these days, I seem to want to devote my mental energy to pursuits other than reading. It’s a strange season of literary malaise… and perhaps literary personality-shift, since in recent years I’ve been a serial monobookist, and here I am reading several books at once all of a sudden.