Can't Wait to [Not] Finish That Book

This morning, over in the coffee shop, I finished reading Richard Russo's new novel, Chances Are ... (2019). I'll post here about the book tomorrow, but I had an "experience" this morning, getting near the end, an experience that I realized I've had many times before but just haven't really thought about.

I can put many of the books I've read into two categories:

• books I can't wait to finish
• books I don't want to finish

Russo's are almost always among the latter, for he, like many of my other favorite writers, creates a world so real--so emotional, so credible--that I just don't want to leave it. For I know I'll never see that world again, not in the same way. It's a world that exists only in his pages--in the pages of that particular novel--nowhere else. And once I've left it, that world lingers with me for a while, then slowly begins to evaporate, melt, evanesce ... whatever. It leaves me.

Sure, some residue remains. But the intense reality of it is gone.

This feeling of loss only intensifies when I'm reading the last/most recent book by a writer I love (as was the case with Russo). Thanks to my wonderful Hiram College professor Abe Ravitz, I have become a serial reader: I gotta read everything by writers I like--and I gotta read them in the order that he/she wrote them.

I wrote here some years ago about the slow journey I took through the forty-seven novels of Anthony Trollope (1815-82). He did not live to finish his final novel, The Landleaguers (1883), and in the paperback edition I read, the novel ends in mid-conversation. When I read those final words (in bed one night) I started weeping--and I walked into Joyce's study (she works later than I!), book in my hand, tears in my eyes. I didn't need to say a word. She knew.

I've recently been reading the complete works of Kate Atkinson (still alive, still writing), but I felt the same way as I neared the end of her new one, Big Sky (2019). My eyes slowed, only very reluctantly moving on, for I knew that when I turned that last page, there would be a bit of a wait until her next book (one is on the way, says trusty Wikipedia, though no date is set; it's called The Line of Sight).

And then there are those books I can't wait to finish--books I'm reading because I "should," but they just don't ensnare me the way my favorites do.

Sometimes, these books are by writers I love. Like Paul Auster. Right now I'm reading his recent nonfiction collection--Talking to Strangers: Selected Essays, Prefaces, and Other Writings, 1967-2017. Now, I admire Auster's talent, his immense erudition, love his fiction, his memoirs ... but ... this book contains some long pieces about French poetry ... and I just can not get into it. 

But I'm reading it, damn it ... I'm reading it.