I have started and finished three (three! three books! ah! ah! ah!) books in the past two weeks. Kitchen Accomplished, you were great. Osprey Island, you were sophomoric. And O the Glory of It All? I think I'll miss you most of all.
The one Stephen King novel I have read, Insomnia, took me about two months to finish. I would only allow myself a few pages at a time, for fear of tearing every page from the hardbacked binding and eating them in a fit of rage, forcing myself to poo out King's disgusting lack of compelling, convincing storytelling ability. (My roommate at the time was a King freak and this was the book she suggested I start with -- I would never have bought a King book on my own). As I neared the end, my best friend at the time suggested that my life as I knew it would be over when I finished the book, so obsessed with completing it, with giving it a fair chance, was I. Indeed, my life did change. I not only became a lifelong Stephen King hater, but I learned that it's ok to not finish a book just for the sake of finishing it.
The reason I bring this up now is thanks to Sean Wilsey's ode to Cinderella, O the Glory of It All. I bought the hardback (I Never buy hardback -- such a ripoff and nearly impossible to read on the bus) on Sanam's recommendation and worked my way through its 482 pages over the course of the past week. Though I liked it better than Dave Egger's supposed masterpiece, by the end I felt like Wilsey has no right telling me how he worked through his childhood shit when I still haven't worked through mine. So you made peace with your dad; yeah? So where does that leave me? Why do I care about you again? Oh, that's right, I don't. Meh.