I think it was on my third attempt that I actually managed to finish reading Lord of the Rings, a rite of passage among my teenage peers. Sure, I might have skipped over some of the songs, but I’d read however many pages of the thing in its three volumes, and it felt like an accomplishment. It helped give me an exaggerated respect for books, as a result of which I’d carry on with them regardless of whether I was enjoying them or not, as a point of principle.

It wasn’t until I was 22, and struggling through Giles Goat-Boy by John Barth that I realised I could, you know, just stop reading. A lightbulb moment. The book is enormous, and amusing from time to time, as in the section that reframes the Oedipus legend as a tale of the wild west, but there’s just too much of it, most of it hopelessly indulgent, as might be expected from an author who’s an academic professing to write an anti-novel (anyone who can tell me what that is, I’d advise not to).

Liberated by the realisation I could just stop, I’ve since continued to abandon books before they’ve finished. Why bother, when there are so many more promising things to be getting on with?

And why stop with novels? Does anyone really need to hear Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music once the first five minutes has given you the gist? Watch incomprehensible Romanian productions of The Tempest that even Shakespeare would have found obscure? Wade through all 12 volumes of Tsugumi Ohba’s Death Note manga series, when it’s clear after 5 that his irritating portrayal of female characters isn’t going to change?

Life is too precious to waste on art that makes no attempt to communicate with an audience. And yes, that applies to films too. Has anyone seen Liquid Sky? I hope for your sake that you haven’t. It’s a repellent tale of aliens feeding off the vital fluids – sexual and/or narcotic – of vacuous 1980s New York hipsters who find every utterance they make, like, totally meaningful. Horrid things happen to horrid people in a horrid film basically. But somehow I sat through the whole thing, maybe because I’d paid for my ticket and wanted to see if it became tolerable. Or because I didn’t want to emulate the people I’d seen walk out of Mishima not long before, a film I found utterly compelling in its highly stylised storytelling, but I know some people found pretentious beyond belief.

Now, if I find that my attention is not with a film, odds are it’s because it’s lost my interest. I might doze off, to come to when a door slams or a gun is fired, and see a few more minutes before deciding whether to watch it properly or to take the hint of my sleepiness and leave. Yes, I’ve become someone who walks out of films. Not many, admittedly, but frankly if I’m administered a soporific then I’m likely to doze, and when I wake up I’ll make my exit. It’s not a lot to ask, is it, that a film maintains your attention throughout. That’s got to be the minimum bid made by a screenwriter or director, surely, to keep the audience awake. And I feel no shame about slumbering if that contract is not abided by, or walking out altogether if things don’t get any better.

This blog will go on hiatus, returning on Sunday 20^th, for excellent reasons that will become apparent on my return. Have a good few days.