Finishing novels you're not enjoying...

My partner asked me the other day, with no small amount of exasperation, "Why do you continue to read novels that you obviously don't like?"

I guess I was frustrating her by droning on and on about all the reasons I thought my latest reading project (John Green's Paper Towns) was a disappointment. It didn't help that, just two days earlier, I had droned to her about how I felt my then current reading project (John Green's An Abundance of Katherines) was itself disappointing.

The answer to her question, however, was fairly easy: I refuse to stop reading any book simply on the basis that I don't like it. No matter how bad I think it is, there's always something I can learn from it as a writer. After all, the book in question has been published; it has made it through all those vetting and testing processes (agent, submission, publisher, acceptance, editing and revision, publication) to arrive in my local book store, processes that I have yet to negotiate successfully with my own creative work.

For that reason alone, I can learn something from even the most disappointing published novel.

And John Green is a hugely successful, award winning author of numerous best-selling young adult novels. Even if I personally don't like his books, clearly plenty of people do, including agents, publishers, critics and readers. If I can't learn from someone like that (both positives and negatives), then from whom can I learn?

So I read the entire book and I make mental notes of the stuff that I think works really well, the stuff I think is less successful and the stuff I believe has made the novel commercially successful where I have been less so.

In the case of John Green, I can see much to admire in his books. He writes in a very smooth, easy, "readerly" way. He doesn't let his own cleverness get in the way of a good read, even though he makes some interesting and "writerly" choices along the way. In Katherines, for example, he includes any number of footnotes and graphs, items you rarely see in fiction, but he uses them effectively as a complement to the character of his narrator. They are "writerly" but used in a "readerly" way.

Both of Green's books I read contain scenes that I found remarkably engaging and fun and I think he uses the comic novel formula fairly effectively.

Even if I think his secondary characters (such as his narrator's best friends in each of the books) are two-dimensional and, frankly, replicas of each other (Hassan in Katherines and Ben/Radar in Paper Towns are basically the same person -- oh, who am I kidding, every character is the same from book to book, from his socially-awkward, school-smart protagonist to the street-smart, vivaciously bold female lead to the main characters' parents), I think he uses those characters well to build, in a natural way, very funny situations.

It's his plots that really let me down. They are all build up and no payoff. And, perhaps because I am of another generation, his insistence on concluding that the key in any life is leaving your past (and your life) behind for the open road and infinite opportunity makes absolutely no sense to me.

Nor does his predilection for extremely talky, wordy plot climaxes.

And, if I am going to nitpick, I am concerned that he is rather loose with his borrowing from other writers. In Paper Towns, his main character's comment about feeling "infinite" during a certain moment of daring is clearly an uncreditted reference to The Perks of Being a Wallflower and I'm sure the Canadian rock band, The Tragically Hip, would have appreciated an acknowledgement as well.

All of that being said, I can certainly take a number of lessons from John Green and the two of his cadre of fabulously successful books that I have now completed. I just don't plan to read any more of them.