Does anybody out there keep track of the books that they abandon? How often do you abandon one?
I have a DNF (did not finish) shelf on Goodreads, so it’s very easy for me to sort by date “finished” to see how often I give up on a book. (I mark a book as finished reading when I give up on it, so that it records the date that I abandoned it. I have seen from past posts on here that some people find that uncouth, so maybe y’all don’t have access to this sort of stat.) I average about 9 abandoned books a year.
Looking at my Goodreads stats, I average about eight per year. However, I only add books to that shelf if I’ve read a substantial chunk. If we’re counting the books where I read four pages and flung them away with an oath, that happens much more frequently!
Catch 22 (I hated it so much I threw it out)
HP and the Order of the Phoenix because it was so gdam long and getting boring. I was reading them because my mom loved them and I wanted to share. Then she died and so did my interest in the potterverse.
The Foundation Trilogy. Nothing against it directly. I just sort of…stopped. In 1979. I am in book 2 and I don’t remember a single thing. My bookmark is still there. I don’t think I’d be able to just pick up where I left off.
Usually I try to finish everything because a seemingly bad book may come around again at the end. (spoiler alert: they don’t all!) And the author went to so much trouble, I owe them to stick it through.
Yeah, there are some books where I read the free sample and decide I’m not interested. My dividing line is if I went to the trouble to download the entire book (indicating that I committed to reading it) and then got further into it and changed my mind.
I consider starting to read a book a sort of commitment. Once I start, I see it through. There have been exceptions. Not long ago I pulled our copy of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” off the bookshelf, having read it at least 40 years ago, and thought about re-reading it. I got about 25 pages in and thought “Nah. I’m not reading this,” and put it in the book donation box along with a few others that I no longer had an interest in reading or re-reading.
But to answer your question, I very rarely not finish a book once I’ve started. And if I do, it doesn’t get a second chance. It goes in the donation box.
I also didn’t finish Catch22. I enjoyed it, but I thought the bit was very repetitive, then my copy got rained on so I never bothered to get a new one.
Two others off the top of my head are Naked Lunch and Salt: A World History. I’m very very slowly making my way through Surveillance Capitalism. An outside observed would say I’ve abandoned it, but not me, yet.
Until well into my adult life I completed reading every book that I ever started. Even if I wasn’t enjoying the experience. At some point I realized that books (in fact most forms of enjoyment) seldom redeem themselves by dint of perseverance once they have first stopped being pleasurable. So I learned to skim to get what I wanted and save time for better books. Now that I am much older and can see how much time I have wasted on unworthy entertainments I am ruthless with everything - books, movies, TV shows and even sport. I give them an opportunity but drop them very quickly if they aren’t up to scratch. There is too much good stuff around and too little time to find it to bother with dross.
I used to be a cover to cover reader in the past, but now, in middle adulthood, I can’t remember the last time I actually finished a book. I have dozens of titles I’m pages or chapters into, but then I jump onto some other thing and then never remember to go back to it. Same way with video games, movies, and TV shows.
It’s so hard to maintain an attention span of more than an hour or two these days. I think smartphones and video games have irreversibly damaged my brain.
I’m afraid to even look at my Goodreads anymore… these days it looks less like a bookshelf and more like the mass grave after a battle.
I’m the same. It’s very rare that I don’t finish a book that I started. There have been plenty where I finished it just because I was too far into it and I wanted to see how it ended, but I almost never abandon a book once I have started it.
I’m a fast reader under normal circumstances. If I’m not into a book and I just want to finish it, I’ll speed up even more, not quite to the point where I’m just skimming it but I will get through the rest of the book fairly quickly.
Huh. I guess I’m in the minority here, but I liked Catch 22.
FWIW, Mrs. Geek didn’t like it either. I told her that it was a good book and that I liked it, and she got maybe a third of the way through it at the most and gave up on it. She probably would have abandoned it sooner if I hadn’t told her that I liked it.
I struggle with finishing books quite often. Even books I really like. It takes some measure of discipline for me to finish without getting distracted by something new. I’ve even enthusiastically recommended books I never finished.
I liked Catch-22 which is odd because I don’t usually like war stories.
Over the last decade or so I’ve adopted the philosophy “life is too short to read crap.” I’ve ditched maybe five books this year, most recently Mat Johnson’s “Pym.” I’ve discovered that if I suddenly have a burning desire to read the bad reviews on Goodreads, that’s the kiss of death for that book.
I use Kindle and the first few chapters of any book are available free as a sampler. I’d say three quarters of the books I review this way I reject and don’t buy.
I do about 50 books a year, all non fiction. Only did not finish one. Thought it was a book on evolution, turns out it was really creationism in disguise. Threw that crap in the trash.
Not often. I may not read all of the stories in a short-story collection, but that’s mainly because I’m not interested in all of them. A few books I remember:
Foundation and Empire (Asimov). Read the first book, but got distracted about halfway through the second one and never picked it up again. Been thinking or starting book one again, and finishing all three of them this time.
Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein). Boring. Everybody kept talking about how great it was, but the first time I tried reading it I couldn’t make it through the first chapter. Second time, I made it as far as chapter two. Not interested in giving it a third try.
Job: A Comedy of Justice (also by Heinlein). It started out fine, but I lost interest and gave up on it around two-thirds of the way through.
A Wrinkle in Time (L’Engle). Read it in grade school, probably fourth or sixth grade, and liked it. Tried rereading it a few years ago and quickly got bored.
Adam Bede (Eliot). Having enjoyed Silas Marner, I decided to give another of her books a try. Got bored and took it back to the library. 19th-century literature was fine while I was in high school, but can’t deal with it now.
And a couple I’m not sure about:
The Three Comrades (Remarque). We read large chunks of Die drei Kameraden in my third year of high-school German. Got the English translation from the public library, but honestly can’t remember if I finished it or not.
Silas Marner (Eliot). Read part of this in 11th-grade English, and liked it enough that I got a copy from the library afterward. Again, can’t remember if I finished it or not.
I’d read “Catch 22” a couple of times, have always considered it one of my favorites and have often championed the book in discussions about it.
That was until about a year-and-a-half ago. I have a nice hardback and I decided to read it again. It had been at least 20 years since I last read it. This time I struggled to get through it. It just seemed to be a never-ending slog. It’s only a little over 440 pages but it seemed like twice that. I was surprised that I found the absurdist humor that I’d found so engrossing had worn thin on this third read.
I don’t keep stats, but it’s not that uncommon for me to stop reading after awhile or read selected parts before giving up on a book. I estimate this happens at least a third of the time.
Sometimes it’s due to new (to me) mystery/detective fiction authors who are disappointing, or works of history that are badly written/colossally dull.
I realized that Dick Francis had lost his touch when I was reading one of his later novels (after his wife died). Previously they’d all been page-turners, but this one was poorly enough done that I quit halfway through and left the book in an airport.
You may already be aware of this, but Moby Dick had a couple of real-life inspirations, namely a real white whale named Mocha Dick that was a bit of a terror, and the sinking of a whaling ship named the Essex. Both are interesting to look into if you aren’t already familiar with them.
The Essex was out whaling when it collided with a sperm whale, which may have been accidental. Whether it was accidental or not, the whale got pissed off and rammed the Essex, doing enough damage to sink her. Unlike Moby Dick, the whale that sunk the Essex swam off and was never seen or heard from again. The rest of the book is fiction.
There was a book called In the Heart of the Sea published in 2000 which tells the tale of the Essex. I haven’t read it so I don’t know how factual it is. I have seen the movie of the same name which was based on the book, and the movie did take a few liberties with the factual aspects of the story.
Regardless of how factual the book may be, you may find it interesting.
