A.B.C.: Always Be Closing (Covers)

Coffee’s for closers (warning: bad language in linked video), and libraries are for last-pagers.

You heard me.

You call yourself a bookworm? You’re gonna read a book, you better read all the way to the last chapter — no, the last word — no, the damn endpapers.

If that percentage-complete on your Kindle or Kobo doesn’t reach 100%, then you’re a fake. Holden Caulfield would say: a phoney. (But you probably aren’t well-read enough to get that reference, are you, ya wannabe?)

Any true lover of literature knows it: if you start reading a single book and don’t finish it, you lose.

Especially if it’s a classic.

Especially if it’s something everyone else has read.

Especially if you got in at least a chapter.

Reading is a game — no, a sport — and there are winners, and, well, losers. Sorry, did I say “losers”? I meant no-good scum who pretend they like books and words and literature, who bask in the oohs and aahs of visitors seeing their packed shelves for the first time, who wouldn’t know figurative language if it bit them on the ass.

Even one single book is enough to take you from champ to chump.

Because being a “reader” means you like to read, get me? Nothing less. If you don’t finish one, just a solitary one, of the books you start, you obviously aren’t in it for the reading. You’re in it for good writing or exciting plots or — for Chrissake — intriguing characters. Did you see “reading” in any of those things? I sure as hell didn’t.

First prize for finishing every book you start? The undying admiration of every person of intelligence you meet. Second prize is unimpeachable literary cred. Third prize?

Third prize, you hand back your library card. Understand?

That precious rectangle of plastic is for finishers, chum. If you can’t handle me at my James Joyce, you don’t deserve me at my Harry Potter.

You think reading is all fun and laughter? You think you can squeak by indulging in only the ineffable mix of tension, stakes, and prose that actually make you want to finish the book?

Puh-lease.

For Chrissake, you can’t even stick with genre fiction. Every fourteen-year-old-nerd in the English-speaking world has read Lord of the Rings at least five times. How dare you get stuck on the first page? You can’t take the Tom Bombadil, buddy, you wait until you get to the big leagues. How do you expect to take on Lady Chatterly’s Lover if you can’t deal with the slow pacing of Twilight?

Excuse me? “But some books are boring?” You’re boring. I’ve been reading for twenty-seven frickin’ years. You came here thinking of Agatha Christie, I came here thinking of Edgar Allen Poe. You came here with an e-book list longer than your Twitter feed, I came here at Virtual Bookshelf zero. You read a dozen novels a year, I read a dozen novels a week. And that’s just fiction.

Maybe your English teachers and librarians sold you a pretty story about a world where everyone who reads a book does it out of love and interest. Maybe they spun you a pipe dream where readers crack open a spine and find the sweet sight of pages so intoxicating they practically turn themselves.

Well, I don’t know what world you live in, chum, but every page I ever read, I had to turn with my own two hands.

It’s like you suckers still believe the kiddie fantasy that books should give you something back. You holding out for knowledge, entertainment, enlightenment? You also chase the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and still look for toys in your cereal box?

I don’t remember or enjoy a damn thing I read, but I get the job done, and that’s the difference between men and boys.

Don’t you “De gustibus” me, buddy. The only Latin you need to know is Ex Libris because with your sorry excuse for literary staying power, the only books you’re ever going to see are the ones in my private library where you’re sticking in the nameplates, annabe-way oseur-pay.

And you know how I became a big wheel (of time, that is — finished those too, in just under a couple hours)? You see this bookmark? This bookmark’s been in twice as many books as your nose. What’s your Amazon order history look like?

You see, pal, that’s who I am. And you’re nothing. Got better things to do than trudge through the great works of literature one agonizing page at a time? Don’t care. Dislike a book everyone else likes? Screw you — go home and watch your reality TV. You wanna be a real reader? Then finish the damn book!

Every time you flip over a title page, you’re starting a fight between you and the book. You know what happens if you give up?

The book wins.

Simple as that.

And if you’re gonna let it, ya deadbeat, save us all the trouble and go back to your Honey Boo Boo.