Morning-After Reading Regrets

A while back we had a fabulous guest author here, crime fiction writer Hallie Ephron. Like we NovelMatters ladies, she blogs with some fellow authors at their site, Jungle Red Writers. 

Recently they asked their readers which movies they had watched that they wished they hadn’t. Their readers were enthusiastic in their stories about everything from being ambushed by gross-out films, to those which were an unremarkable waste of time except for one image or one line that lingered as persistently as garlic on a stranger’s breath in the morning.

Books are that way, too. Sometimes we stop reading something—or keep reading something and are filled with regret later. (I was such an ignorant prude that I threw away my copy of The Good Earth when I was 13 years old because it actually suggested that Chinese people had sex with one another. Never did finish that one. But I do remember something about them eating mud during a famine.)

So – X-rated books aside, which books are so remarkable in your memory that you wish you’d never read them? Do tell. Give titles. Describe details—unless they involve sex and mud and anything else that might gross me out. 

What We Wish We Lost

After a stimulating week of discussion about what you’d like to keep, I want to turn our attention to those things we’ve written and published that we wish would go away forever.

When I was in my 20’s I wrote an article for a Christian women’s magazine. It was entitled “How to Squeeze More Time Out of Every Day.” It detailed how I had two children, helped run a political campaign, had several church ministry jobs, wrote books, baked my own bread, cooked everything from scratch…

What was one of my brilliant solutions to lack of time? It was to wean yourself back from sleep until you were only sleeping five hours a night. I did it, why couldn’t everyone else?

I look now at the photo of myself and think, how did somebody so young get so stupid so fast. I hate whoever wrote that smart-alecky article and think now that most normal women who read the article should have hated me too.

Oh, I wish that article was never written. Thank goodness it’s not on the Internet. That’s one big reason I love the Lord so much – He can wipe away all our sins and remember them no more.

What have you written that you regret?