Steve Leveen says that we should allow ourselves to give up on reading a book if we’re just not feeling it after, say, 50 pages (via). I’ve written about this before – it’s one of the tenets of the Reader’s Bill of Rights. Leveen asks:
Most of us give up on people faster than books. Imagine you’re at a cocktail party and the first person you chat with turns out to be a stupendous bore. Do you keep talking to him for the next hour because you started with him?
Well, the difference is that you haven’t paid to chat with that person. By contrast, most people have bought the book they’re reading, and they’re loath to give up on that investment. That’s why libraries can be so liberating – if you don’t like a book you’ve borrowed, you can return it, and you haven’t lost anything.
Also, Leveen has recently written this book, which looks very intriguing.
i have a 10 page rule. If i’m not caught by then, out it goes. Some people claim I’m depriving myself of some of the world’s best novels; I reply that they’re depriving themselves of the enjoyable strings of novels I read while they struggle with Blue Mars.
I didn’t learn to give up on a bad book until my late 20’s. I would plod through a book no matter how much it sucked. I read the unabridged version of Anna Karenina and MAN is the middle freaking long and horrible… it took me two years to finish that monster. Anyway, it’s so liberating to mature enough as a reader to say, “Well, this totally sucks, I believe I’ll just STOP READING IT NOW.” (But to be honest, I still have finisher’s disease and I usually don’t actually give up until I’ve read at least a third of a book.)