How to Read a Boring Novel
Since my teenage years, I’ve been addicted to reading books, particularly novels, because they allow me to explore worlds that were previously difficult for me to recognize in my limited reality at the time. I often turned to novels to heal or recover from certain illnesses and ailments that would suddenly overtake me. I remember one time when I was struck by a high fever, which confined me to bed for several days, shivering beneath the covers, eating or drinking nothing but water, with sweat pouring from my face. Then my eyes fell upon a novel stacked atop its counterparts in the corner of my room. I forced myself to walk weakly over to it, held it up, and began reading it while lying on my sickbed. Its title remains etched in my memory to this day: “Spotted Dog Running at the Edge of the Sea ” by Chingiz Aitmatov. As soon as I finished, my fever subsided, and I awoke feeling well, as if it had provided me with the energy of recovery.
However, sometimes I long to get hold of a particular novel, because its author is a famous writer. This writer may have won an important international literary award, or they may have a surprising title, such as “How a Ghost Fetus Forms in a Goose’s Belly.” I think that’s a shocking title, isn’t it?! Perhaps one day I will use it in one of my novels—who knows? Titles like this when my appetite to immerse myself more in reading. But sometimes—I say sometimes, thank God—I fall into the trap of boredom, this heavy thing that tries to creep in and prevent me from continuing my reading pleasure.
The reason for my boredom may lie in the novel’s emptiness and its lack of an amazing opening that can captivate its reader and keep him in his chair until the end, so that he remains throughout the reading searching for the hidden link between it and the events of the novel. An opening like, “After many years, in front of the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía remembered that distant day when his father took him to introduce him to ice,” or “Suddenly, as if a hurricane had planted its roots in the centre of town, the banana company arrived, pursued by a storm of leaves.” Openings like these made me fall in love with García Márquez’s novels. They are rich, they awaken my curiosity, and therefore they leave no pore for boredom to creep in.
Another reason that opens the door to boredom for me is a slow or overly descriptive beginning. I remember almost choking when I started reading Tolstoy’s The Brothers Karamazov. The author elaborated on the introduction, detailing the family backgrounds and philosophical analyses of the characters, using complex language. This made it seem truly overwhelming, especially for first-time readers—and classic literature lovers will surely hate me.
Another reason that makes reading a novel boring for me is the postponement of the main event, leaving the reader feeling as if the dramatic action is absent or flat from the start. For example, in Thomas Hardy’s The Return Home, the actual events begin about 100 pages into the novel, and this is not something readers can easily tolerate. If we leave aside the many reasons for boredom with reading and try to find a cure for it, then certainly every reader has their own way of doing so.
As for me, the cure I rely on consists of several steps, the first of which is postponing reading, not abandoning it. As soon as I feel that this novel is boring, I put it on the table, whispering to it, “I will meet you tomorrow.” Yes, tomorrow. In my opinion, it is not appropriate to leave a novel you have started reading without completing it for more than two days. So, when the next day arrives and my sacred time comes—I mean, the one designated for reading—I prepare a cup of tea and begin talking to myself, gently encouraging it to complete what I started the day before, saying, “Since I do not believe in the existence of coincidence, then certainly the arrival of this novel to me does not fall within the circle of coincidence. Rather, it wants to tell me something.” If I am unable to convince it of what I have told it, I continue talking to it in a language that carries within it a kind of focused motivation based on imagination, saying, “Perhaps this novel is hiding its secrets from the recipient.” It takes patience to master it.
After a conversation that may last ten to fifteen minutes, I sit on the couch and begin reading. Boring novels force their readers to sit on couches. Otherwise, how can you adjust your posture whenever you want, and how can you relax in any position you wish if you’re not sitting on a couch?
Sitting on a chair doesn’t allow you to do that. And every time I finish a few pages, I insist on continuing reading to reach the lost secret I’ve longed to discover. It’s inconceivable that a novel written in, say, a hundred pages should be devoid of an important sentence. If I reach the middle and don’t find what I’m looking for, I remove the lens of the explorer to continue reading with the eye of a critic. At that point, I ask myself, “Why was this novel written?” Or, “What did its author intend by writing it?” I cannot imagine him waking up one morning and saying to himself, “Today I intend to write a novel that will annoy readers, without any real purpose.”
In this case, the annoyance itself is the purpose or goal behind writing this novel, isn’t it? If this seems to me to be the case, I have no choice but to connect the events of the novel with my imagination, and I try to become one of its heroes. Of course, I will choose to be the main hero, upon whose character development the dramatic escalation of the event is built. I begin to project my own feelings onto his character, and then I will become emotionally attached to the novel, ensuring that I will not stop reading until I discover the ending of my chosen character.
Even if the novel’s ending is superficial, lacking psychological, philosophical, or symbolic depth, or a traditional ending in which the hero marries or dies, or the narrator provides us with a religious or moral sermon, saying, for example, “And so we learned that greed is useless,” or the novel’s ending is a direct report, such as, “Those events were lessons of patience,” then I will have overcome my boredom and continued reading.
