It's called self-care

How I knew it was time to throw in the towel on a book

I have been trying to read more this year, and I started off the year quite well, powering through 5 books in the first two months of 2026. I had been very particular about my choices, making sure I would program for success. As a point of order, I usually have one book I’m reading with my eyes and one book I’m listening to with my ears going at the same time.

The last Kindle book I finished was Fever: The Complete History of Saturday Night Fever and it was really well written and great fun to read. It made me want to rewatch the movie, but it never takes much for me to want to do that. I decided to read on of my many, many BookBub purchased next, figuring if the road to my eventual bankruptcy will be paved with $2 eBooks, I might as well read one. The book in question was The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government. I have yet to finish Fellow Travelers, but despite that, I’m really interested in that period of history so I figured this would be a great next read.

Wrong.

While it’s interesting and doing a fair job of telling the story, its prose is so dry that I found myself never wanting to read it whenever I had time to read. I was powering through because I really hate giving up on books. But today, I decided that enough was enough. I wasn’t going to let one book that wasn’t for me derail my reading for the year. So I abandoned it and am not looking back.

I’ve felt kind of restless today, unable to land on a task, nothing seeming very appealing. I think it has a lot to do with the incoming blizzard (not much snow forecasted but 60mph winds will blow what we do get around a lot.) I think I’m apprehensive about having to snowblow the driveway tomorrow because the last time I tried, the snowblower didn’t start in the moment of truth. I went out yesterday and made sure it started, but that does not assuage my fears all that much. So it was with that mindset that I set out to pick a new book. I was perusing the Kindle library on Amazon - all 964 items lol - and I ultimately landed on something that I meant to read last year but just never got around to.

Not sure why this says “Book One” because it’s definitely Book 2 in The Mayfair Chronicles

It is Anne Rice’s Lasher, the follow-up to what I consider to be her magnum opus, The Witching Hour. I’ve read The Witching Hour, which clocks in at 1000+ pages, twice in my life. The first time was in 2000 (via paperback because that was the only way to do it then) and the second time from November 2024 to March of 2025, this time listening to it in audio form. It was 50 hours long but worth every minute.

I have heard that the two other books in the series (Taltos being the third) fall very far short of The Witching Hour in terms of quality. Be that as it may, I read the first 25 pages this afternoon and I love going back to that world. It is equal parts comfortable and uncomfortable. You never know quite what is going to happen, but at least the surroundings are familiar. The Witching Hour is one of my favorite books, and one that I will likely not reread in what’s left of my life because there are plenty of other 1000+ page books I could be reading rather than rereading The Witching Hour. However, I did say the exact same thing about Stephen King’s It and I’m 80% of the way through my 4th read of that book, this time on audio. So far, it’s a million times more engaging than The Lavender Scare and honestly, I think if I want to consume content about that period of history, I will actually bring myself to finish Fellow Travelers (which has the pleasant side effect of looking at Jonathan Bailey) or read the book upon which it is based.

Lasher is a mere 640 pages compared to the gargantuan The Witching Hour. But I still imagine it might take me a while to get through it. Self care is not holding yourself to a timeline when it comes to reading, and it definitely includes tossing books that are not doing it for you to the side in favor of something more your speed.