Who’s duller: Edwina Currie or a goldfish?
Asurvey of 2,000 readers suggests that many of us suffer from a condition known as ‘book block’. When a book begins to bore us, we undergo a form of literary paralysis. We are unable to carry on reading it, but at the same time we are reluctant to abandon it.
Four years ago, an American maths professor analysed data from Kindles. Determining the last point at which each reader had highlighted a passage, he was able to work out how many readers had reached the last page of an e-book.
The results proved particularly disappointing for Hillary Clinton, as only 1.9 per cent of readers had managed to make it to the end of her po-faced autobiography Hard Choices.
The next two least-finished books were, coincidentally, also the most fashionable of that year: Capital by Thomas Piketty (2.4 per cent) and Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (6.4 per cent).
The late stephen Hawking scraped in fourth, with just 6.6 per cent of readers reaching the end of A Brief History Of Time. I suppose you could say this statistic proves Hawking’s point about the unexpectedly bendy nature of time: a book of just a couple of hundred pages takes most people an infinity to finish.
There is, of course, one thing worse than not being able to finish a book — and that is not being able to start it. some opening sentences stick in the mind simply because one takes so long to battle through them.
Take this one, for instance, from the 19th- century Irish writer Amanda McKittrick ros, rated by some connoisseurs as the worst novelist who ever lived: ‘ Have you ever visited that portion of erin’s plot that offers its sympathetic soil for the minute survey and scrutinous examination of those in political power, whose decision has wisely been the means before now of converting the stern and prejudiced, and reaching the hand of slight aid to share its strength in augmenting its agricultural richness?’
Are you still with me? Of course, some books ramble on in this vein for many hundreds of pages. I was once advised by a professor of english Literature never to trust anyone who claimed to have got to the end of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce.
The same is probably true of robert Browning’s long and tricky narrative poem sordello. It is said that when he wrote it, Browning claimed that only he and God knew what it meant. some years later, he admitted: ‘And now only God understands it.’
But, in some cases, fascination lies on the other side of boredom. All you have to do is persist. Fishermen know this — and so do people who tackle jigsaw puzzles. Dullness has its joys. What else can explain the continued popularity of goldfish?
In the same way, if you persist with a book that is truly boring, there may come a moment when it starts to exert a hypnotic pull. At this point, you can grow hooked on discovering just how much more boring it can possibly get.
Take political diaries, for instance. The title of Most Boring Political Diarist is a hard-fought contest between the former Labour apparatchik Bernard Donoughue and the former Conservative junior minister edwina Currie. From Donoughue’s diaries comes this almost impossibly boring entry: ‘ 31 July 1974: My drip-dry shirt was nice and dry but my socks still wet from overnight washing.’ yet if you read that sentence three or four times, it becomes strangely mesmerising.
After a while, you start imagining Donoughue’s disappointment as he feels those damp socks, and then his delight with his drip-dry shirt, and then his little burst of jubilation when he thinks to himself: ‘ Aha! At long last, something to put in the diary!’
BuT do Donoughue’s socks ever quite attain the giddy peaks of dullness achieved by edwina Currie’s air conditioner?
In her second volume of diaries, Currie writes: ‘7 september 1996: someday, someone will invent a quiet, dust-free air conditioner for small rooms but it ain’t happened yet.’
Later, edwina surpasses even this personal best by totting up the latest polls, and sharing it with all her readers: ‘ We’ve slipped back again 2 points to 25 per cent, Labour up 2 points to 57 per cent (i.e. 32 per cent ahead) with the Liberals on 15 per cent.’
And now read on! Or am I boring you?