I pride myself on only one thing: I read a lot of books, and I always have. Also, that’s a lie. I totally pride myself all over the place for other things like being able to remember everything Tracy Jordan has ever said and tying a knot in a cherry stem with my tongue and alphabetizing and cataloguing and making lists and also other stuff. So whatever, I’m a liar. But the point remains. I read a lot of books. I was such an asshole about it in my earlier years that I would regularly do things like ignore my sister and make her cry because I was reading, and my mom was always yanking books out of my hands to get me to do chores (this was before I discovered TV), and my favorite personal anecdote, how I would go over to friends’ houses and ignore them in favor of examining their bookshelves. Luckily, most of them were cool and didn’t stop being friends with me.

Anyway, back when my brain was still growing and developing and all that young people stuff my ability to read books was just phenomenally weird. I never got tired of it. Never. I would read stuff everywhere because if I didn’t read stuff I might die. I would read anything, and as a first sign of the slight OCD I would develop in later life, I always, always finished what I was reading, good or bad. As a result of this long formed habit, there have been only five books in my entire life that I have not finished because I just couldn’t do it anymore. I bring this up now because I am angry that the very first book I ever consciously put down and decided not to finish — a monumental step, I assure you — I am now being forced to read. I had planned on avoiding it for the rest of my life, and I don’t even remember why I hated it so much, I just remember the hate. Burning, seething. Resentment. I put down James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man at the pinnacle of my high school career, during which my personality can only be described as “panicked,” “type-A,” and “perfectionist,” (qualities that soon disappeared in college as I lost THE FEAR, THE FEAR being the thing crucial to getting all of your work done in a timely and efficient manner). I was in the IB program, if that means anything to you. It was Hell, but it made college so easy.

Whatever. The point of this whole thing is that I wanted to share with you the only five books that have ever failed me, or that made me fail myself, however you prefer to look at it. They are life ruiners.

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