If you could change the ending of any book, which one would it be?
As many others responding to this prompt have noted, it’s borders on pretentious to say what we’d change about an artist’s work. Perhaps it’s even disrespectful of the artist and his or her creative process and toil that brought us their books.
When I first read this prompt, I began thinking of book endings and realized I don’t have a particularly clear mental catalog of the precise endings of most of the books I’ve read.
(Yes, I do read books, but go ahead with jokes about me being illiterate!)
Delving deeper into why that is brought me to the realization that I haven’t read much fiction in the past 20 years. Instead, my reading list has trended more towards history, biographies, and memoirs. Makes sense, since history was my major, and I chose it because I loved it.
But I digress. One story (not a book) that had an ending that has resonated with me for decades is Kafka’s In der Strafkolonie (“In the Penal Kolonie). But I wouldn’t change that ending! (Sei gerecht!—Be Just!)
Another — an honest-to-Goddess book — is Ulysses by James Joyce. The ending of that book is perfect. It felt like a reward for slogging through the challenges of digesting Joyce’s stream of consciousness style for hundreds of pages. The ending of that book is vivid in my memory, to the point that I remember that I finished reading it on a pleasant spring day in April while sitting on chair at the University of Michigan’s Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library. The library was pretty full that day in the lead up to finals, and I had to sit in a random chair near some of the library’s stacks.
As I finished the book and closed it, I felt happy. Wouldn’t change a thing about the ending and revisiting this memory makes me think I should read it again.
