Recently, I was about halfway through Anxious People by Fredrik Backman and thought – I really don’t like any of these characters! They were annoying and I couldn’t see how the plot would progress. Then a thought occurred to me: Backman named the book Anxious People for a reason. Yes, on the surface they were annoying but underneath, they WERE anxious. So I decided to stick it out. And I didn’t regret it. It all came together: by the end of the book you understand their anxieties and the story comes to a wonderfully satisfying ending.
This has happened to me before. I had a similar experience with Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman. Initially, I found the character of Eleanor flat, dull and odd – uninteresting. Only when you discover how her personality developed do you begin to feel empathy for her. The message I took away is that it just takes one person to reach out to someone who is broken or hurt to change their life. A very powerful message.
How many times have we met someone and judged them for a superficial reason? How they dressed or spoke? Decided they fit a stereotype after one interaction? I would have missed out on some amazing friendships if I had judged people by my first impressions of them.
So that’s where the phrase “Don’t judge a book by its cover” comes from.
But then, there are times when unlikeable characters are just…unlikeable. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen immediately jumps to my mind. It’s basically the story of a family breaking down and apart. Readers either liked or hated the book. I liked it even though the characters were horrible people.
So what do we do if we find ourselves deep into a book and not connecting with the characters or the story? In my examples above, I stuck it out and was rewarded – I enjoyed all these books. But I am also not afraid to close a book and surrender. There are too many books too read, too many books on my list. I even created a ‘back-shelf’ category on Goodreads to categorize books that I tried to read and gave up. Some books on my back-shelf are pretty popular: Americanah, Cutting for Stone, Lincoln in the Bardo, Braving the Wilderness, The Bell Jar.
Ultimately, deciding to perceiver through a book we aren’t enjoying or putting it on your ‘back-self’ is an instinctive decision for me. If I love the author’s other books (Anxious People), if a friend has advised me to keep going (Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine) or I just want to see how it ends (The Corrections), I’ll stick with it and hope it was worth my time. The best test for me is if I don’t want to read the book before I go to bed. That is my normal routine and if I can’t bring myself to read then- something is wrong with the book.
What about you? What books have you put down that everyone else seemed to like? What books did you almost put down but are glad you stuck with it? Please share in the comments.
Happy Reading!
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