A question for Gentle Readers—what’s a bigger deal, the beginning of a book or the ending? I don’t mean for marketing purposes, or for writing, but some abstract sense of importance for making a book good or bad, whatever criteria you choose for that.\n
Hmmmm. I’ll make it a little more concrete. Think of a dozen or so books you like—not your favorite books, because you probably like both the beginning and ending of those, but books you like okay. Do any of them have a disappointing ending? Do any of them have a weak beginning?\n
Just looking at a few of the last books that I’ve read, I would say that The Forever War<\/a> has a weak ending, and that so does The Time-Traveler’s Wife<\/a>. I talked about Little Dorrit<\/a> and its beginning. I think, though, that there aren’t very many books I like that have weak beginnings. There are quite a few that have endings I consider weak. That seems odd to me, because I would think that after all the buildup, if the ending isn’t great, I would be substantially disappointed. On the other hand, the odds are that by the time I get to the ending, the book has built up enough hedonic capital that it would take a spectacularly bad ending to go bankrupt. Whereas, you see, if the first fifty pages or so of a book are rotten, then (a) I am likely to just give it back to the library without finishing it, or (2) it will need to become spectacularly good to pay off the debt of hedons it owes me. I wonder, though, if that’s Just Me.\n What do you think?\n chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek<\/I>, A question for Gentle Readers\u2014what\u2019s a bigger deal, the beginning of a book or the ending? I don\u2019t mean for marketing purposes, or for writing, but some abstract sense of importance for making a book good or bad, whatever criteria…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10300","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10300","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10300"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10300\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17831,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10300\/revisions\/17831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"