Sense of Failure

I gave up on that book I was reading yesterday. I got halfway through yet another story involving some more dodgy magic realism and decided sleep was more important to me than finding out what happened next.

(Hello young writers, we've all read Marquez, Rushdie, Roy, Isabelle Allende, Peter Carey etc etc. We know about mysterious transformations. It's not amusing anymore but will be tolerated in small doses if there is a point. Yes I know there probably was a point to Tokyo Cancelled but I had to wait through too much artifice to care.)

Of course, these protests mask my deep sense of failure for not finishing I book I've started. I've always been like this. I've wasted days and days of my life persisting with books I hate just to say I've finished them. Much easier to stop reading a collection of short stories than a novel or a biography (even though with biographies it's usually clear that the ending will involve death.)