Permission Granted!

“Life, for all it’s agonies of despair and loss and guilt, is exciting and beautiful, amusing and artful….” ~ Rose McCaulay

Over Labor Day weekend, and I decided to take the weekend off, and do some of the things that fulfill me, other than work! A book I had greatly anticipated reading, sat on the library shelf, all by it’s lonely, just waiting for me to take it home! I could barely wait to start my long weekend away from the cyberworld, and become fully engaged in a different kind of literary entertainment.

As it has turned out, my weekend has not been free of labor! I have labored long and hard over a book, that has been heralded by others as a wonderful read, but it has done nothing for me! I read and I struggled, I read and I labored, I persisted and worked at reading it some more. I wanted to give the book due diligence. Finally, after 75 pages, I abandoned the book! I kept feeling as if I had let myself down! Not only myself but also, the author and those who recommended that I read it. It was as if I had not completed a task I had been given!

I was even feeling guilty – until I turned on C-Span Book TV! Marji Ross of Regnery Publishing www.regnery.com was speaking to a room full of students at George Washington University advising the students that the internet serves a great purpose but if they were to become real students of government, they needed read to books, and lots of them! Political, history and business books and to find their own political viewpoints based on what they read. She said “you don’t have to agree with everything you read.”

She summed up her presentation with the words I had been waiting to hear all weekend – “You don’t have to finish every book you start.” Alas, a good reason to put down the book once and for all! And as for the guilt, I thought “Be done with it, too! Permission granted!”