Writes Maya Chung, in "Go Ahead, Put Down That Book" (The Atlantic)(free-access link).
That links to "When Is It Okay to Not Finish a Book?/How to decide to put down a book—without all the angst" (also in The Atlantic, with a free-access link).
Before dropping a book, you need to figure out what’s motivating you to stop reading it.
Is the writing truly bad, or is the author experimenting in a creative way that might push you as a reader? And if you hate something enough for it to elicit a huge emotional response, it might be worth sticking with it to better understand why. Mariel VanLandingham, a high-school English teacher in New Jersey, told me via email, “I love when a student comes into class railing about an assigned reading they hated: getting them to define why they feel so strongly and getting other students to react to them is a worthwhile experience for everyone. I would rather them power through something they hate and have big feelings about it than not read at all or be apathetic.”
This is a topic I've blogged about before, and I know I can find the old posts by searching for "Doris Lessing." There's this, from 2022:
I read this in Doris Lessing's "The Golden Notebook":
And shortly thereafter, I threw "The Golden Notebook" aside.
The 2 Atlantic essays would have you "put down" the book, but I like the Doris Lessing approach of throwing it aside. Fling it.
And back in 2007, I encountered the advice, from Tyler Cowen, to "discover your inner economist," by asking "Is this the best possible book I can be reading right now, of all the books in the world?"
He seems to be saying you should toss the book aside if the answer is no. I'm afraid that's a formula for never finishing a book. Isn't there something to be said for maintaining your focus and following through lest you approach reading -- and presumably everything else about life -- with a growing case of attention deficit disorder? Take it from me. I read virtually the same advice written by Doris Lessing in the introduction to "The Golden Notebook," which became the first book I tossed aside following the principle. That was about 30 years ago. Since then, I've started a lot of books, and I would have cast them all aside -- save one or two -- had I not forced myself through some of them. But the vast majority of the books I've started lo these 30 years, I haven't finished, and the crazy thing is that I maintain the belief that I'm still reading a book for many years as the pile of books I believe I'm reading piles up. One thing about reading on line -- especially reading to blog -- is that what you don't finish evanesces. Once the day has passed, you feel utterly absolved of any obligation to go back to anything. The text flows on and you grab what you want and feel no pangs about what goes by unread. The question is what's new? I mean, what was I saying about a growing case of attention deficit disorder?
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62 comments:
That is an argument that is neither convincing nor compelling. There are few books that I don't finish, although there are some. Usually I set them down when I get too bored or too exasperated with the author, give it a few weeks, and then resume. But I almost never give up on them altogether, and if I was the kind of person that was willing to do that after a few dozen pages, then I would need to re-examine my book selection rationale - because I think that idea sucks.
Way back in college in the 1980s I read The Gormenghast Trilogy, three fantasy novels by Mervin Peake. At the end of the last book I threw it across the room in disgust. A friend had been reading the previous books, and borrowed the last when I finished, despite my warning that it wasn't worth reading. It came back with the spine ripped because he threw it across the room after reading the last page.
If this true history of two people's experience with this lengthy trilogy makes you want to read it, in some perversely reverse psychological manner, please, just don't. You have been warned.
A while back I started on a free book and only got to the third page. The female lead walked in on her boyfriend/husband in bed with another woman and peanut butter was involved. Pretty much stopped right there.
I read books. It’s comments I fling. Helps to have an ipad with protective covering.
My late mother-in-law would finish every book she started, as a matter of pride. But she met her match with The Bridges of Madison County. To fling a rejected book requires a roaring fireplace to receive it.
There was one booker award winning book which was very tedious
Refusing to bail on a bad book is absurd. All the while you are dying.
When I was younger I felt I owed it to the author to finish what I started. As my remaining hours turn fewer, I figure the author owes it to me to keep me reading.
With some books, I got the picture by chapter 2, and the rest (skimming forward) was going to be justification and examples. OK, I'm done. Some I got lost in and couldn't be bothered to restart (Dream of the Red Chamber). There are other books in the world.
As with mikee, Mervin Peake left me with an extremely sour view of some other people's ability to judge books. I regret losing those hours.
What is the minimum before dropping an Atlantic article? Or a blog post ? (Just asking...)
When you get to my age you have to consider the Opportunity Cost of reading something mediocre when there's so much good stuff to be read.
There are more absurd notions than this one, but not many.
Ideas stolen from Seinfeld, South Park, and Simpsons episodes are hard to avoid.
Years ago I started "A Perfect Spy" by (John Lecarre). After about 250 pages (not quite halfway) I nearly abandoned it, but decided after the time I had invested I might as well go ahead and finish it. I'm very glad I did. It was one of the more powerful books I have ever read.
I don't finish action novels that turn out to be written by the yard.
I finish every book I start. I skim over some of the more tedious ones until I get to the end. There is a lot of self-indulgent crap out there, but I have a compulsion to get to the end.
I struggle with the fanfare for Russian authors. I loved "War and Peace" but "The Brothers Karamazov"is torture. Drama, drama, drama and long winded at that.
There was another work by mark jacobsen which was a clever tske on godzilla he thought it was very tedious
I'll be 81 in a couple of months, so I suppose my number is "19"--or will be. I'm willing to stop reading and Atlantic or New Yorker article before I hit 19 words. Now books are another question. I read a lot of modern novels, thrillers and such (and I finish them all). But is you are reading something by Michael Connelly, John Sandford, James Lee Burke, Andrew Mayne or Lee Goldberg, you can pretty much know what you're going to get within the first 20 pages. I also read a lot of Anthony Trollope. He is windy. You read the first 20 pages and he hasn't even cleared his writer's throat. Still I enjoy Trollope as much as, or maybe even more than, the modern writers. And yes I finish my Trollope novels as well.
I virtually never stop reading a book -- but I do speed-read.
My experience in the late 70s was similar.
I found that in order to finish a book these days I have to see it as part of some personal project. Where I used to read to find out what was going on, I now read to find out how it all started or to escape it. Some very interesting hours spent on Eastern Europe (Ukraine). And some time spent on the history of "early modern Europe" which is being revised by our overlords into the history of "early modern evil." This is, for English speakers, the history beginning with the English Civil War. That's when we founded our liberties or, if you will, started on our career of evil. Compare and contrast the two approaches. Or else I just enjoy scenes from a vanished life - like the late Forties and the Fifties which I remember and which reappear, like a miraculous cache of edible tinned food in a bombed-out city, in Nero Wolfe books and others like that.
The one good point is that young people should read through stuff they don't like, if it's a novel that has stood the test of time. But as for those of us who have lived many decades? Well, you can stick your "experimental fiction" where the sun don't shine if it hasn't engaged me in the first 20 pages or so.
And if a reader can fully understand the inner life of a novel, it probably means that that reader is another novel writer, because unless you lay the hints on with a trowel, nobody is going to get all you are putting into it. And nobody gets more exasperated with a novel than somebody who can piece together the thought processes of a writer.
When it comes to finishing books, I usually soldier on. I feel obligated to read the whole book. However, there are exceptions to that rule. When Joseph Heller published his second book, Something Happened, I wanted to read it because I had loved, his first book, Catch-22. So I started to read the book and it was slow going. I felt it had to get better, so I continued to read it. After getting through about 1/3 of the book I finally gave up because as far as I was concerned, nothing happened!
Me too. That experience at least kept me from being disappointed with the miniseries.
How many novels in the history of novel writing have successfully experimented with the form and changed what came after? I mean what are the odds that this piece of dreck that has me bored on page 20 is one of those?
I used to be puritanical about finishing books that I started. Now I'm pretty cavalier about it, but the ones I finish far outnumber the ones I abandon.
To make up for not finishing one, I might re-read another.
"I read only good books, over."
I can usually tell fairly quickly if it's a book I want to read so don't start what I'll stop. I read fiction for fun and enjoyment and I've either become more picky or there's just less good out there and what there is I've found hard to find. Partly why I like when books are talked about hereabouts. I've found more than one worth reading. Notably the discussion of Convenience Store Woman by Althouse sparked both personal and academic insights. And I wouldn't have started it otherwise.
I'm fairly well read and read very difficult books for my profession so I'm not really shamed when I don't like or want to read something. I can usually give the reason why it's not right for me now. Maybe some other time or maybe never
I've recently in the last couple years found myself stopping mid read books I've lived and reread many times before. I have come to realize those that I liked and treasured when I was young we I don't resonate with now I'm nearing 50. Like good friends who life has moved me on from. I can't regain what they once were for me.
I'm currently reading through the collected not-Sherlock short stories of Arthur Conan Doyle.
Exactly
Most novels written before 1920 start slow. Its like the authors were expected to introduce the characters and then slowly get us into the story. Modern novels (post 1920) are different, I can pretty much tell by page 50 whether I want to continue. I know from experience that few modern novel get better as they go along. The last novels that I junked after page 50 were Updike's "Rabbit Redux" and Cheever's "The Wapshot Chroncicles". Other ones I Never finished:
Catch-22 (usually bail out 1/2 way through),
Finnagan's Wake,
Intruder in the Dust,
The little Drummer Girl
Asimov's - Foundation
Bellow - Adventures of Augie march
Beach Red
Ship of Fools
I struggled through the "Last Tycoon" just to see what Fitzgerald had written and left unfinished. Otherwise, I would've bailed after page 50.
A lot of author's I'll get through 1 book of their's and then say no more. Usually, if they have a vanilla literary style and write a huge number of books (like Tom Clancey) you're just going to get more of the same. Like an old 60s TV show after season 1.
50 pages. If the author hasn’t grabbed me in 50 pages I move on to the next book. Which I always have waiting for me.
Wait a minute. This is the days of digital books on Kindle and Audiobooks. Good luck flinging the IPad aside.
But it also allows easy storage forever that can be gone back to to finish a bad one and to replay a great one over and over. Also it doesn’t require a moving truck to relocate houses.
For purposes of scientific data I checked Audiobooks and found 785 in memory. The kindle hoards are much smaller because Kindle Unlimited makes you turn one back in to download a new one.
What you need is a mentor who turns you on to the good stuff. We have had the best one here for 15+ years. I still recall her saying she loves Bill Bryson’s voice reading A Short History of Nearly Everything. That opened up many Bryson books to enjoy.
I finish books. Some of them enthrall me and I can't help but finish them. Others are a tough read - I'm working my way through a history of Dodge City, Kansas called "The Delectable Burg." It's hard to get through because much of it is quotes from newspapers back in the day, with florid prose, and the author has a tendency to follow tangents with unreserved vigor before working his way back to where he left off.
Typos within the first few pages are almost impossible to read beyond.
The comments from the culture mandarins the Professor refers to reminds me of reading Eliot's Middlemarch and Dickens' Bleak House. The narrative/ plot /story I didn't find that memorable but the writing! The word selection, arrangement, and style of both books was delicious. Reading those two novels was like a meal entirely selected from a four star rated dessert cart.
When I was in high school I breezed through the first two of CS Lewis's space trilogy but couldn't get into the 3rd. Must have started and stopped 3 times before I plowed through the first 100 pages and found out how good it really was. That's why there are some books I judge quickly as not worth my time and some books I realize I just need to be in the right frame of mind and patience for.
Most writing (novels, poems, non-fiction, articles, stories, blogs) is shit.
Gotta give Dickens a shout out. Bleak House was a good story and if you finished it it made a door stop.
My mother, child of Ukrainian immigrants and the Great Depression, worshipped books. They were a whole world to her. Each was a prize to be read all the way through. Now the books I download on my Kindle aren’t even tangible — I couldn’t tell you how many pages I have read because it depends on the font size I choose. In this situation I feel less inclined to believe I owe it to the book to read on. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.
I regret the time I wasted on terrible books. I'm one of those people who will keep reading a bad book because I hope that it will get better. Anybody here slog through Battlefield Earth? That book was so bad that I wanted to throw it out the window when I finished it.
As I've gotten older, I will stop reading a book because it just is so badly written that it can't hold my interest. Also, if a book is obvious propaganda, I tend to not respect it. Amazon's Kindle library is filled with cheap books that are so badly written that you can't make it through them.
I still finish books that make me uncomfortable. I made it through The Road by Cormic Mc Carthy. That book is really hard to read because there is no punctuation it it. (Not even quotation marks.)
"Butter bang!" - from National Lampoon's Movie Madness
BTW, I actually enjoy the movie Battlefield Earth. It's so bad that it's actually funny to watch. It's one of John Travolta's best films. "Animalman!!!!!"
If you think a book is good, try reading it aloud (something I enjoy doing). Until I tried it, I didn't realize how often I skim. When reading in my head, it's easy to think a book is great. Aloud, the boring, overwritten parts go on forever. I've ruined many good impressions of a writer this way.
I read a lot of series. Usually, I like an author, and will buy the whole series so I can read them all in order. One of the series I just couldn't get into. I read 3 books in, and there are 6 more. Unfortunately I learned my lesson, and won't be ordering a whole series at a time anymore. I also switched to kindle except for biographies, which I have a library full. I love to reread them, when something comes up in the news about a person who I own a book of. I ran out of room on the 2 huge bookshelves I have, and had to purge a bunch of books.
Very seldom do I not finish a book, but this one (A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram) I just couldn't get through. At 1000+ pages I decided there were better books to read and usually have 2 or 3 in "process" at any one time.
What is this sense of obligation to finish a book? I don’t get it.
I read "dropping a book" in the title of this thread literally, as when you are reading and you doze off and the book falls out of your hands. That does seem to happen sooner as I get older. I very rarely metaphorically drop a book that I've begun, but that's mainly because I'm pretty particular about what I books I begin.
Even the very best book is a poor substitute for a halfway decent tug job.
99 pages. If at that point I don't care if any of the characters live or die, the book goes to Mr. K's used books for someone else. "Satanic Verses" was a clear violation - pages before chucking.
"The Atlantic" mag also got the "off the island" treatment after 25 years of reading when their anti-Trumpism became too tedious.
I haven’t finished The Goldfinch, and I once had the hots for Donna Tartt when we were pals and she wore super cute skirts. I find it’s easier if there are lots of pictures.
- Krumhorn
For me, sometimes a book is just really difficult to read, but it's worth it in the end.
Example: "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus," but Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Traditionguy: I listened to one of Bryson's books read by him, and was put off by his pseudo-Brit accent. Then I listened to an audiobook of "A Short History" read by a good British reader, and it was great. (A 13-hour drive both ways).
I couldn’t put down Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum. The Bede was not only Venerable but a master story-teller. Riveting!
Sadly, no pictures.
- Krumhorn
I start each book with a frame of reference having to do with the varying degrees of curiosity, sympathy for the author or message, and the amount of time I can spend. Sometimes I read books because I dislike the author or message, and I need to satisfy myself that I am not on the wrong track. So for me, every book is on the clock, in a probationary period of sorts.
One of my pleasures is to go to my public library and browse lots of new books. If you try this, you will be astonished by the vast numbers of books that are being published and acquired to fulfill some political or social agenda of the left. It only takes 30 seconds to figure this out.
In college, one of my professors assigned Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke. The next day, barely 40 pages in, I reported to him that the book was horrible. "It may not be good, but it is good for you," he replied. " You need to read what the other side is saying so you you can understand how they think. By the time you are finished you will realize that William F. Buckley never had an original thought in his life. It's all in Burke."
I write for pleasure, I don't try to publish anything, which may change, but a constant question in my mind is "exactly how many words can I get away with to bring in some atmosphere, or to deepen reader immersion, before the reader skips ahead because I overdid it."
If I use my own judgement as a reader, it's not very many, but as a writer, I get pleasure from blathering on, since I am trying to fully describe some scene I am imagining.
"My late mother-in-law would finish every book she started, as a matter of pride. But she met her match with The Bridges of Madison County. "
The Structural Engineer in my office read "Bridges". He expressed great disappointment that the book contained very little about bridges. Yet he finished the book.
Hope springs eternal one supposes.
Perhaps everyone knows this, but our city/county library will order almost any book that is requested by a card holder. I particularly request non fiction books I read about in the WSJ book reviews (because most fiction is purchased anyway).
If you like horror in short story form, I recommend "Unpleasantness: Ghost Stories for the Depressed", and "Where The Ocean Was" by Nathaniel A Giles. Author has a real knack for writing a gripping description of a horrible scenario. Free if you have Kindle Unlimited.
I’ve read the first two multiple times and always been wowed. Never made it more than a few pages into the third, though I’ve often wondered what Peake was thinking in between the writing of the two.
Very much this. There are zillions of good books but the hunt is time-consuming and the work of a lifetime. Same thing goes for music, though streaming has made that search far easier and less expensive than it was.
I used to be less picky. But there are so many more choices now for reading that I have become picky. If the author is not capable of holding my attention, either by entertaining or educating me, then why should I slog through? Now that I am retired, I am reading voraciously again. And there is plenty of material that is truly good that the sub-par writings get tossed quickly. Normally by page 50, I know if I am going to consider the work worthwhile.
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