I ran out of time and out of steam before completing Jane Smiley’s Horse Heaven this week, and didn’t make it to the finish line. To tell the truth, I lost impetus before the library due date arrived, and switched to another book.

It’s not that I disliked Horse Heaven; in fact, the stories, characters, and language are actually quite wonderful. But that’s what it seems like—not a novel, but a series of short stories, strung together because they are all about the same subject—horses and all the people who surround them (owners, trainers, jockeys, etc.) in the racing business. And while I love horses and stories about them, I have never been a short story person. Short stories are, to me, like all the worst parts of starting to read a new book, with none of the payoff of getting to enjoy it once I’m invested.

As I kept going, the anecdotes and vignettes were beginning to add up, and I had hopes they would eventually converge into something, but it was taking a long time. I liked the picture she was painting, but a “through story” never developed, so the book didn’t drag me along in the way a novel would, making me want to know what would happen next.

While “through-story” isn’t a concept commonly used in readers’ advisory when we talk about appeals, maybe it should be. Without it, a compelling quality of story—momentum—is missing, and without momentum some readers have trouble getting to the end of a book. Even those of us who revel in language, character development, and world-building can have trouble with a book essentially lacking a plot—that ordered sequence of events that includes exposition, conflict, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. While a plot may exist in Horse Heaven, its presence is so diffuse as to be indiscernible (at least to me).

After reading it for at least an hour a day for about a week, I received an email notice from the library that my book would be due in three days. I felt sure I was getting close to the end, or at least the three-quarter mark, and could beat my deadline, but when I checked the page count on my Kindle I discovered that I was at page 267 out of 543! At that point I decided to go read something (shorter) with a beginning, middle, and end that is all of a piece. I’ll come back to Horse Heaven someday when I’m in a different mood.