Stop Me If You've Read This One Before

This is the book on my bedside table, the one I am currently devoted to reading.  Good one, isn't it?  I can say that with authority, since despite my efforts to explore new stories, I have read it before.

From the moment I picked it up from the library shelf it seemed familiar, but the synopsis on the dust jacket did not ring any bells.  Granted, I scanned it while the two kiddos tried to use my backside as a launch pad to climb the library stacks, so I may not have been at my sharpest. I've read several books in the lovely Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series (one of my favourite pastiches, in fact), but I know there are gaps of episodes I have missed. It wasn't until I was about three chapters in that the shape of events began to follow a pattern that rang.  Curiously enough, it was when the protagonist started making reference to events in other books, ones I HAVEN'T read, that it dawned on my that this was one I had already consumed.  

Now I am in suspension. Should I put the book down?  I know how it ends.  It's a fine story, but not destined to be one of the books I read over and over.  The more I read, the more detail I remember of the events yet to come. I am divided on what I should do.  Right now, I am actively trying to read a large number of books to study form and narrative.  I can learn as much from a familiar book as from a new one - perhaps more, since I will be able to sit back from the drama of discovery and look at the story structure. I have a literal mountain of reading to get on with, piles and piles of books to attack.  It seems wasteful to be spending my precious reading time on a retread when I have so much I want to accomplish. 

And yet...

I can't put it aside.  It would be like leaving a melody incomplete, like knocking the first part of "Shave and a haircut" without finishing the phrase.  It bugs me to be doing an unplanned second reading, but it will also drive me batty to have STARTED the story and not finished it.  If I had the time to read as I would like I would just put my shoulder down and power through it, speed-read to sprint my way to the end of the book.  This is a question of emotional resonance, I feel the need to complete the pattern.  I need to sing the rest of the song.

Even if it means the reading mountain doesn't shrink this week. Oh, sigh.