The fine art of not finishing books, shows & anything else you don't want to finish

the anti-recommendation list.

(there is a fair amount of a pre-amble to this newsletter, if you just want the anti-recs in a swift delivery method, please scroll to the bottom)

I have always been a reader and a watcher. My parents are readers and watchers too (and ambitious ones at that) and my brother and I spent most of our school years in the company of our grandmother, a retired professor of literature and former high school principal who was very encouraging of reading of any kind (I notably took out ALL of the Agatha Christie books from the library the summer I was 11 and meticulously worked my way through a *breathtaking* amount of pastoral murder that would have probably raised eyebrows in other households). I also hung out at my local video store (remember those?) long enough when I was 14 that I call it my first job (they eventually let me org and visually merchandise some stuff and talk to people ad nauseum about the sliding quality scale of Stephen King adaptations), and notably went to see “Reservoir Dogs” with my Mom at the age of 12, because “it did so well at Cannes”. This is just how we rolled, and still roll.

I married an avid movie watcher (we have the ticket stub for the first movie we ever saw together “Inherent Vice” framed in our home), and I keep a tiny, fancy Clare V notebook with all the books I read in the last 5 years, written down in cursive, and it is the thing I’d freak out the most if I lost (over my phone, or even wallet).

This is a (very?) long intro to say that this is just what I do, what I always did, and what I always will do.

Having said that, somewhere around 2020 and the lock-down reading became fully propagated to us as a virtue, and watching things became sort of our only window into the moving, living, breathing outside world. Bookstagram/booktok was taking off. There was very little to do outside of reading and watching. All of a sudden, reading was a lifestyle, talking about movies and shows was something everyone was doing even if they had no idea what they were talking about. In many ways this whole things was a perfect situation for me, who was not only born to be “a house cat” according to my husband, and spent the previous decade writing about movies and shows, but was also dealing with massive emotional and physical downsides of going through rounds and rounds of IVF, pregnancies that didn’t happen, or happened and didn’t last, and more and it is probably a secret COVID blessing I was not allowed to take my crying-at-the-drop-of-the-hat self into the unsuspecting world (though I do feel we should normalize talking about all of it, whenever we can). I started posting my books on the instagram stories and as a result, you are now reading this newsletter (and maybe 101 other substacks). Hey there!

The #1 thing I get asked in DM’s (and book DMs are my most favorite thing, please send them to me all the time) is “How do you read so much?”. Well, first of all, how much you read is not what makes you more accomplished. What is right for me is not right for everyone. And second of all, I live a relatively peaceful, conducive-to-reading life: we are in the woods, I have a job which is both wildly demanding and very flexible since I am in charge of it, I am childless, my husband is a relatively self-sufficient human that also understands my need to leave the bed before 6am and read in peace for an hour before the day starts, I don’t like exercising so I don’t spend almost any time on that, and I CHOOSE to read or watch things over any number of other stuff (mainly over scrolling trhough social media - putting my phone in a drawer at 6:30pm every night is the best habit I have). Reading is first and foremost, an escape from a screen-filled life - it is a big reason why I also still get paper magazines and newspapers too. But I also don’t think this makes me better or worse than anyone else - I think I probably read a little too fast, and wish I had the patience to embark on some of the bigger, longer, more challenging books more often, I wish I was less afraid of non-fiction, etc… but this is just how I am and that is how I am likely to stay.

I do think reading and watching are muscles you exercise - kind of like training for a marathon (something I’ve never done, mind you, and something I’ll never do because I to this day have not learned how to run in a way that doesn’t look like Phoebe Buffet) - the more you do it, the better you are at it: the ability to stay the course, not get distracted etc. And there’s a million think pieces and substacks about how to break from a reading rut (and, in extension, if I am being jaded: become a more virtuous member of the social media society).

(this gif is dedicated to

Nina O

)

But the one thing no one talks about (WE’RE GETTING TO THE POINT OF THIS NEWSLETTER, I PROMISE) is that to read a lot you need to read what you like. And that means being (very, completely, totally) OK with not reading / not finishing things you don’t like.

One of my former staff (who was a low-key genius about a lot of things, very intuitively - hi Kaylee!) had a rule about how she would always try to start a book when she knew she had time to read a full 50 pages, and that if by page 100 something wasn’t clicking, she was ok walking away from it, no questions asked. She imparted this wisdom to me, casually, when she was 25 max, and I think it is truly the most useful peace of reading advice I’ve ever gotten. Until then I’d start books at night, pass out 15 pages in, struggle my way to remember what happened the next day, slog through 10 more etc. So - you have to start a book fully conscious (I like an early AM or an after-lunch break), dedicate a minimum of a solid, focused hour-90 min to it, and then go from there. In the same vein, by page 100 it is not happening for you, it will likely not happen (I KNOW some books reward perseverance, but I am not perfect and neither are you). Same rule for shows - give the 1st episode (or 2 if it is a sitcom) undivided attention, no phones, no bonus activities, and if it clicks, cool, if not, also cool.

There’s so much art out there, you are not behooved to any one piece of it. It is ok to not like things. It is ok to talk about not liking things. This whole world can’t be just one giant recommendation - knowing what people DIDN’T like is just as useful.

So, on that note - here’s a non-complete list of books I started and didn’t finish recently-ish, as well as some authors I completely gave up on as a result of several failed attempts:

• Come and Get It - Kiley Reid - I really enjoyed “Such A Fun Age” but just couldn’t get into caring about the characters, what the premise was, etc - stopped probably around page 70ish?

• Anita Del Monte Laughs Last - Xochitl Gonzalez - I used to LOVE Reese’s book club picks (they were like candy to me) but the quality has just gone down, and this is a prime example. I read Gonzalez’s first “Olga Dies Dreaming” and enjoyed it, but this felt almost … hollow? Characters were all tell and no show, no one was likable (and I am an art world nerd) - just not for me. I feel we should normalize saying this book is not good (I only made it to page 75 or so, but it was not good).

• Land of Milk and Honey - C Pam Zhang - I was very excited about this (sort of Youth / Station Eleven / The Children’s Bible / Bliss Montage premise and I love love love the niche reading territory of emerging Asian novelists more than most things) but I just couldn’t get past the first few chapters. This one I think I may actually try again at some juncture. Maybe.

• Circe - Madeline Miller - People loved it and I felt it was like a series of SNL mythology skits without any emotional pull.

• Cult Classic - Sloane Crosley - Boring and annoying characters. I am actually completely off Sloane Crosley after this. I did not finish “The Clasp” either, and I want to scream every time I read one of her essays - most notably this one (you have to scroll to the second part since it is 3 essays in one link) on living more sustainably by not buying trash bags and using plastic bags from bodegas. !!!!!!

• Y/N by Esther Yi - this was on a million best-of lists and I loved the premise of a sort of meta fanfic thing involving an unnamed narrator and a Korean pop-band they’re obsessed with - but my brain just couldn’t process the prose.

• Good Half Gone - Tarryn Fisher - I read “The Wives” like a good member of instagram thriller not-so-secret society and the premise here sounded fun but the writing was so blah, I couldn’t make it past page 60. In general, I am very ok not finishing thrillers these days.

• Any and all Colleen Hoover - the only one I ever finished was “Verity” (which I still maintain is basically VC Andrews fan fiction for people who are afraid to read actually good thrillers) and I am actually a big fan of Colleen’s whole human energy - but these books are completely pointless unless you are trying to just get your fingers accustomed to turning pages again. Otherwise -if you have ever managed to read an actual novel, this will feel pointless. Will I still watch “It Ends With Us” on Netflix? Probably.

And, for good measure, a few shows I gave up on after the first episode, that people keep recommending:

• Ripley - again, love Andrew Scott, but he is too old for the role, and the vibe just felt off? (like, arty for the sake of arty)

• Gentlemen - just watch the original movie, which was the last truly great Guy Ritchie outing.

• Palm Royale - can we all agree to look past the outfits and say out in public this was not good? It was not funny enough, it was not catty enough, it was not anything enough. A waste of talent really.

• Apples Never Fall - Speaking of a waste of talent.

• Death and Other Details - Glass Onion wasn’t great (The Last of Sheila / original Death On The Nile with Mia Farrow, Angela Lansbury and Jane Birkin are the forever “Murder on a fancy vacation” standards) but this was awful (it has been blessedly canceled too)

• Regime - just very unpleasant. Also, quite triggering based on my Eastern European upbringing crossed over with the high risk of dictatorship future over here.

Summary: Not finishing these books or shows probably saved me 10s of hours to finish books and movies and shows I did like (and more of that in newsletters to come). Any, stay-away-froms from you?