So, it was the best of times and the worst of times?
I admit I have a thing about having to finish books. It’s not rational; it doesn’t matter how much the book cost or how much a waste of time I feel it is, for some reason I have to finish. I suppose that’s why one of the things I love above the kindle is the “sample” feature. If the first chapter doesn’t hold my interest, I don’t buy the book.
And like others have said earlier, I sometimes have to put a book aside for a while before taking another stab at it. If the book is part of a series, I may finish the book but I won’t go on to the next one. That’s happened with Game of Thrones, Outlander, and Shannara.
There were only two books I can remember deliberately not finishing. One was called something like The Science of Harry Potter. This was in the early days of Kindle and something must have gone wrong in the conversion from print to electronic media. Pages were in the wrong order, paragraphs would be interrupted mid-sentence with another paragraph, and so on. It was absolutely unreadable.
The other book, The Dawn of Amber, was unreadable for other reasons. A continuation of Zelzany’s Amber series, the prose style was so puerile and the characterizations so off I never even got through the first chapter. I not only literally threw the book across the room, I actually burned it.
Hey, I’m 57 years old. Why finish a shitty book when I have only so many more years to read good books?
Took me THREE YEARS to get all the way through Bleak House. Now I think it’s one of the greatest novels I’ve ever read.
It’s not unusual for me to take six months to finish a book. I think 18 months is the longest span. I’m still working on a Newbery winner I started last August, so we’ll see how it goes.
I’d guess I bail on about 15 or 20 percent of the books that I start, fiction and nonfiction alike. In nonfiction, it’s usually because I don’t find the material or presentation as interesting as I’d hoped. In fiction, I stop if the writing style is horribly annoying or when I realize I just don’t care what happens to any of the characters. I don’t think I even got to the third page of the Twilight Saga before I realized it wasn’t for me, as it failed spectacularly on both counts. Sometimes I manage to slog through more than half a book before giving up.
Yes, I have done it a number of times. Most recently The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu. I actually got through the first one and started the second when I decided the plot was stupid beyond belief and I couldn’t keep track of all the characters with Chinese names. No point in spending time on something I am not enjoying. Ugh, Dhalgren. I got maybe 50 pages into it and threw it away. Many other books. I keep coming back to the authors I really like. And I reread often. I have probably read Lord of the Rings four or five times, although now I skip the part about the swamps of the dead.
To answer the question broadly, yes.
Which was hard for me. I’d grown up reading voraciously, and spent middle school reading Sci-Fi short stories. I’d bring home an anthology like “Dangerous Visions” (edited by Harlan Ellison, I discovered as an adult). I might read the Asimov or Dick story first, but I just had to finish all the others before I moved on to the next anthology. Later, I’d start another book, as long as I went back and finished the first one.
But one night in college, I laid in bed, looked over at the stack of nineteen books on my nightstand, and realized “Life’s too short, man…”
Since then, I’ve given up on a number of books. Most recently, a generic “thriller” by Steve Berry. My litmus test is, put it aside, go back a couple of days later, and see if I can remember what was going on. If I think “Oh, yeah, that clever take on the ‘lonely hitman’ trope. I wonder what’s next…” then I finish it. But with this book, I’m thinking “I can barely picture that hitman, other than to recall that I really didn’t care what happened to him.”
Very seldom, and even less often deliberately. Sometimes I just put down a book, get busy for a little while, and never pick it up for a year or so.
I haven’t finished the biography of Jim Henson I was reading last year, because I know he’s about to die in the book. I am too chicken to go through with it.
Two recently:
*
Artemis* by Andy Weir. Really a shame as I loved The Martian, but his protagonist was a selfish piece of shit and I really didn’t care if she lived or died.
Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff. Too horrifying to finish. Maybe I’ll go back to it when all of this is but a memory.
I didn’t when I was younger. If I started reading a book I read every word of it, even if I didn’t particularly enjoy it. Sometime in middle age I realised that this was a stupid waste of my time, I would stop watching TV shows or movies as soon as I lost interest, so I learned to skim novels by just reading the dialogue and the odd sentence here and there. Once in a while I would have to backtrack for continuity but I found out how the story panned out for a smaller time investment.
Now I am too old to spend time reading anything that isn’t a pleasure to read so I give up on books all the time. A while ago I tried reading* Lord Of the Rings* because everyone has read it. I gave up before the end of page one when I realised the style would annoy me and have no regrets.
I have no problem giving up a book (movie, TV series, video game, etc.) I can’t see myself enjoying further - time/money already spent are “sunk costs” irrelevant to the decision of what to do moving forward, since they’re the same either way - however it’s rare that it happens after I’m most of the way through a book.
I feel no obligation to finish a book I don’t like. I have lost track of the number of books that I never finished.
I mostly read books for fun, not because they are assigned, so if I am not having fun, I am glad to stop. It’s kind of like refusing to eat the foods I was forced to finish as a child. No I did not learn to like them when I grew up. They are still repulsive.
I think forcing kids to finish every book they check out from the library (yes, some parents and teachers do that) is a crime, because it teaches kids reading is work, and not recreation.
Don’t think publishers care much about quality, just what will sell. This one did.
I didn’t get that far with Ayn Rand.
Very rarely. In fact, I can think of only two:
“Watership Down”, by Richard Adams. This was when I was in high school, and it was required reading. My report on in spoke to why it was so bad and why I felt it was a waste of my time to finish it. To my amazement - and to her credit - the teacher supported me.
Much more recently, Stephen King’s “11/22/63”. I made it about a quarter way through and abandoned it. I picked it up again several months later and made it to around the halfway point that time. I loved the idea, just felt it was very poorly written. Seemed downright amateurish.
mmm
ETA: and this from a guy who slogged his way through ‘Satanic Verses’ and various Pynchon novels
I am an adult. If a given book does not entertain or enlighten me I don’t bother finishing it. The sheer amount of public domain literature I have on my Kindle is overwhelmong.
That said, I have been reading Ulysses since college and have not finished it. Sometimes years pass before I try again but the bookmark is in place.
You cannot reason a person out of a position they didn’t use reason to reach.
I gave up on Catcher in the Rye about 2/3 of the way through. I’d heard for decades about Holden Caulfield seeing through all the phoniness around him. Seemed more like if something caught his notice, he called it phony. Over and over and over again. Got boring.
I got through a third of the way through Lou Reed: A Life, then gave it up. It was nothing more than stories on how Reed was a huge asshole. Not enlightening at all.
A few years ago I started reading The Frontiersmen by Allan Eckert. I just couldn’t stay focused. And at 626 pages it was imposing.
Lat year I tried to read Longitude by Dava Sobel. I just couldn’t get into her writing style, so I gave it up.