Hours I Want Back

Regular readers of my blog know I can be hard on myself for wasting time watching worthless movies. But after recently spending several hours on a truly terrible book, I wondered:  How do the number of total hours spent watching Hollywood garbage compare over my lifetime to the number of hours I've spent on atrocious books? How does your lifetime scoresheet compare?

I long ago gave up the silly habit of enduring the entirety of either a bad film or a bad book. In most cases, I cut my losses and move on. But in my experience, the average bad movie reveals its awfulness pretty quickly. Even when I watch more than is wise, hoping against reason it will improve, it's rare for me to waste more than 90 minutes on an execrable film.

In my most recent bad reading experience it took me over three hours to realize that as a long form author, the writer is an excellent journalist. She has scant storytelling ability (despite a non-fiction premise having great potential), uses clunky metaphors, and her sidebars go nowhere, including one about what she and her writing partner had for lunch while doing their research.

The more I consider my lifetime scoresheet, the more I think it's time to cut myself some slack about all those lousy movies I've endured.