I gave up on Foreigner at page sixty, first time through, and told anyone who asked that it just wasn’t for me, too much internal monologue, not enough happening. I stand by that as an honest read of page sixty. I don’t stand by it as a verdict on the whole book, which I found out almost by accident two years later during a slow week when the audiobook was just sitting there on a long drive and I didn’t feel like starting something new.
What changed wasn’t the book. It was that I gave it real runway this time instead of bailing the second the pace dipped, and somewhere past the point where I’d quit before, the atevi’s whole way of thinking clicked into place for me, the numeric obsession with pattern and proportion, man’chi, all of it stopped being background noise and started being the actual mechanism the plot ran on. I finished it in a week after that, then went and got the second one.
I’ve been thinking about why I bailed the first time and I think it’s simpler than I want it to be. I was reading it the way I read most things back then, waiting for it to prove itself fast, and this is a book that asks you to sit in confusion for a while on purpose, because Bren’s confusion is the whole point, he’s a translator who doesn’t fully understand the culture he’s translating for. I wanted clarity handed to me on page ten. The book wanted me to earn it around page eighty instead.
I don’t love admitting I was wrong about something in print, it’s not my favorite kind of essay to write, but the alternative is pretending my first read was the correct one just because I said so publicly at the time. It wasn’t. Some books need you to be a slightly different reader than the one who first picked them up, and I wasn’t that reader yet at twenty-six on a first attempt in a noisy break room.
Worth remembering next time I DNF something and I’m tempted to call it final. Sometimes it’s the book. Sometimes it’s just not your week yet.