The Curse of the Page Turner

Last summer I read two books I couldn’t put down: Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. I loved the first one and finishing the second one became a chore, but what happened after is really more interesting. I couldn’t enjoy a book.

When I was reading Cutting for Stone, my days were planned around the next time I was going to read. If I left the house, I made sure to pack my book just in case I had a moment to read. I convinced a friend to read it with me during our vacation together, and every night, as we each tucked ourselves into our very own Queen sized bed in our posh hotel, instead of talking about the day, we fluffed our pillows and cracked open our book. I read an old battered paperback, my friend had it on her phone. When we said goodbye, we agreed our next book would be Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and during my stopover in Phoenix, in Terminal 4, I found my very own copy once I finished Cutting for Stone.

Here’s the thing with both of these books: it had been too easy. I understood what the story was about right away. I knew who was secretly in love with whom, what obstacles they faced, and how they were not going to find happiness until the next generation. I turned the page without considering what I was risking.

When I finished them, I had nothing. I had no book lined up, no plan about how to find one, and a ridiculous expectation that a book could wrap me up in a story so fully that returning to it would not be work.

The truth of it is that reading a book, most often than not, starts out with a very confusing process. The story doesn’t make sense, the characters are odd, the names are hard to remember, and the plot feels thin. Some sort of trust has to be given to a story, and it has to be a persistent trust, maybe responsibility, too. It takes many days of reading to decide you like a book, and in my experience, you can easily reach the middle of a book and still not be sold it’s going anywhere. I didn’t like a book again until five months later when I read Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, a short thing that didn’t compel me until the last ten pages. And then it was over.