You have to give and take when you read a lot of books, especially now that more writers are able to make their work available on the Internet. I have really enjoyed the storytelling ability of some authors and then grinned an an ending that, if visualized, would look like a present wrapped by a clumsy four year old. Some others have good plots but the writing is lacking; of those I am more judgmental and often just wait for a better writer to steal the plot and run with it.

Sometimes an author, yes, you Robert Ludlum – for one, will launch into a political diatribe and I just pick up those pages in my right hand and flip them over unread. Every now and then some writer will take out his disdain for a recent historical figure by making a thinly veiled character seem like a total bozo. I have discovered that, in my opinion, authors who do this tend to be not that good overall at all. Reading  ingredients is better than reading what they have written.

So I do stop reading bad books; I make that call. I have stopped reading some books of good reputation because the subject matter has upset me so – Little Red Riding Hood being one. They have been fiction books and I haven’t seen the need to torture myself for the dubious honor of finishing what I began.

There is a book, non-fiction, from which I had to take a break. It is extremely well-written and the story it tells is riveting. It is Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand. I wrote quite some time ago that I had coughed up a double-digit price for the Kindle version. I started reading all about this young Italian-American fellow named Louis Zamperini whose ability to run took him to the Olympics. I read about his flight training and missions in a B-24 and about the long time he spent adrift in the Pacific.

Then I got to the part where he and his lone companion finally reached an island, only to be picked up by a Japanese ship, whose captain turned them over to the military. I made it some pages into the account and then just had to stop. The short but vivid paragraphs about the Rape of Nanking had jolted me into seeing what was to come for this Olympic POW. I had to take a break.

Then I found myself afraid to go on – tense and close to tears, sort of like when I told my father “No more,” and slipped off his lap at the Red Riding Hood fiasco. I just stopped thinking about it – that is thinking about when I would finish – and now I realized that I am too good at putting it off.

I have started reading again, but to prepare myself, I looked up some facts about what is to come in the book. I am embarrassed that I am wary of my feelings of just reading about what others actually endured, minute by minute. And I am reminded of an American POW I interviewed who told me of returning to see enemy POW’s working fields and being well-fed in the United States, as he made his way home to Indiana.

I also found out that Zamperini came to forgive them, that Billy Graham influenced him. I’m not one to understand that, but that doesn’t surprise me. I’m just hoping that at the end I find that Zamperini and Graham at least added, “but don’t ever do it again.”