Missing links: excerpts also need love

All things literary

In my almost 20 years of life as a reader — ignoring those first formative years spent toddling around the house producing froths of spit from my teething mouth — I never have abandoned books without having finished reading them. Call it respect for the authorial cocktail of blood, sweat and tears or an obsessive-compulsiveness that's never been overcome. Whatever the terminology, the fact remains that I've stuck with plenty of books long past the point of no return, if only to satiate my need for comprehensive reading.

Is there some deep-seeded, Freudian back story to these mutant emotions? Was a much-loved book ripped from this eager child's hands before reaching the last page, leading to a subconscious fear that I can never, ever finish a book in the true sense of the word? I doubt it; you'd have more luck psychoanalyzing the gyrating groins and exposed breasts of a sporting halftime show. Suffice it to say that when it comes to my reading practices, once something is started, it should not be put aside until finished.

Of course, as a student of literature, I've been exposed to more written works in the past four years and at such an alarming rate that my penchant for obsessive reading has gone haywire. All of a sudden, I find myself reading excerpts from texts — chapters, lines, sections and cross-sections excised like organs from their bodies.

To extend the medical metaphor further, we can learn a lot from an individual organ through splicing and meticulous analysis. But, isn't it always better to look at the organ — a poisoned liver, say, or a malfunctioned kidney — as though the corpus is part of a whole?

This is why I've stayed away from "readers" (e.g. "The Faulkner Reader," "The Emerson Reader") save for extenuating circumstances. I'd much rather spend the $10 or $20 to read the excerpt in its original environment than amongst a jumble of others collected like partnerless puzzle pieces in a cardboard container.

I've always understood that, in the world of English instruction, time is so crucial that it is impossible to read every single work as a whole. Thus was born the idea of the literary excerpt — developed in conjunction with the Xerox machine and taking the form of dense handouts that clog our binders and folders. And, when you get down to it, the idea of excerpting works for study makes perfect sense.

"'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all," Alfred Lord Tennyson once said. The same holds true for reading, no? Better to have a read a book of Milton's "Paradise Lost" or a few chapters from DeLillo's "White Noise" than never to have come across these works at all.

And yet, this does nothing but enrage my obsession with comprehensive, from-the-first-page-to-the-last-page reading — especially when the excerpts are taken from works I had planned on reading. To borrow from the previous adage, is it better to ruin a good read and pass the exam than never to have passed at all?