Photo by Larry Mohr
The older I get, the more easily I’ll just stop reading a book I’m not enjoying. Life is too short, and too many books are on the list.
I’m not sure why my mom doesn’t do that, considering how much older she is than I am. But she expresses her displeasure in other ways. Recently she told me about how she was reading a book that 1) wasn’t very good and 2) was really hard to hold open while she was reading in bed. It was making her crazy. “I don’t like being driven crazy,” she said.
“I just started tearing up the book. It wasn’t good enough to save.”
Wow. She read it, but she tore apart whole sections so she could hold the dang thing comfortably and just tossed the pieces as she finished them.
I usually figure the book is not for me, but someone else might like it. Sometimes I know who to give it to. Sometimes it just goes in a charity pick-up pile.
But tear it up because it is not good enough to save? I sure hope no one ever feels like doing that to a book I write!
• Have you ever done something like tear up a book?
