Quitter?

So today is the perfect day for a reading marathon. Serious rainstorms are predicted for the entire day. The house is clean and in order, laundry done, taxes filed, no visitors expected. Every one's errands are taken care of, including delivery of fresh strawberries to my sister so she can bake Aunt Draxie's old-fashioned strawberry shortcake for her Easter dinner (yellow cake split in layers with sugared strawberry filling and then the whole cake covered with egg white meringue frosting). Willie the pit bull is snoring on his bed behind my chair and, if luck holds out, will not want to go out in the rain for even a short walk. To repeat, a perfect reading day.

Here's the question though: do I keep on with this book even though I'm 56 pages in and still not feeling the love? Meltzer's fiction was recommended to me by a friend who'd seen the History Channel Brad Meltzer's Decoded programs where he reveals the background true stories for his fiction. The Inner Circle deals with a theft and murder in the National Archives. The idea is intriguing, but I must not be in the mood for this kind of story. So far the main characters seems "lite". So, I think I'll quit on Meltzer for today.


Instead, surely there should be something in this stack that's worthy of a rainy day? Perhaps Claude and Camille Monet's love story after just seeing a fresh new Impressionist exhibit last weekend at the Speed Art Museum. Or, Rutherford's Russka, a sprawling historical novel of this country since the beginning of time? Or, Sebastion Faulks' A Week in December about the current economic upheaval?


Moving over to stack 2, I could choose from the new Maeve Binchy that I intended to read in March. Or, The King's Speech diaries, or some romance set in Italy and Ireland. Or, still more Scandinavian crime writing in preparation for my August travels to Sweden, Norway and Denmark? But, after considering everything in these well-stocked TBR stacks, I think it will be the first book in Ken Follett's new trilogy, Fall of Giants. I read a few pages of it last night and was immediately drawn into the story and characters. Should see me through this rainy holiday weekend quite well.

What about you? If you start reading something and it leaves you cold, do you put it aside? Or, do you press on to the end even though you're not liking the journey? For me, life is too short and there's too many important books to be read to keep trying to finish one just because you started it. But whatever your reading style--enjoy!