Am I misremembering? I thought Moby Dick swam off as well.
I generally do finish what I start. Though if I bought used I’m likelier to abandon than if I paid full price.
I finished 66 books last year. I haven’t been keeping track of what I do not finish, but guess about 50 a year.
The last book I failed to finish was Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling. This got terrific reviews. It won the National Book Award, always a sign of high readability. Everyone should read it. But somehow, the writing was not for me.
I just finished the first chapter of Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World’s Mightiest Empire. It is in a serious book, by university professor, in a genre that I hardly ever finish – ancient history. And yet it has grabbed me in a way that makes me sure I will finish.
David Copperfield, Great Expectations, and Oliver Twist were complete page turners for me. Bleak House, and A Tale of Two Cities, I have repeatedly started and never gotten far into. It is a mystery to me what I will like.
I can put up with almost anything. I’ve even read Dianetics from cover to cover (yeah, I was young and naive once). I don’t need a method to keep track of the unread ones as there are only three and I’ve retried two of them multiple times. I expect to get through the other.
Like some others in this thread, I have yet to make it through Catch-22. The other two books I haven’t finished are Infinite Jest and Don Quixote.
I actually got through much of Don Quixote, and will probably give it another shot within the next year or so. Due to another thread, I promised myself that I’d give Catch-22 a fourth or fifth chance, so probably also within the next year or so. I’ve tried Infinite Jest probably close to ten times and never get past page 80 or so. I’m not sure if that warrants another attempt.
Warning: spoilers for Moby Dick if you haven’t read the book.
In the book, you meet Captain Ahab early in the book and the voyage of the Pequad kinda ends up being a revenge hunt for the whale that took his leg. At the end of the book, Ahab mortally wounds Moby Dick but ends up getting the harpoon rope caught around his neck and gets taken away as the whale leaves.
In the real sinking of the Essex, there was the first collision with the whale (probably accidental), and then the whale rammed the boat (definitely not accidental), and the whale swam off and that was it. There’s no revenge story to complete, no one got dragged off by a harpoon line.
The real story of the Essex also basically starts with the collision with the whale, and after the second collision that’s it for the whale in the entire story (not so in the movie I mentioned, not sure about the book). The real story of the Essex is what happened next. The men piled into lifeboats and…well it gets gruesome after that.
There’s no revenge story in real life, no one-legged Captain, the whale wasn’t mortally wounded, and the Captain wasn’t dragged off to his death..
I usually read about 100 books a year, and there’s another 30-40 I start but don’t finish.
Ah, the joys of retirement.
Likewise. The only time I don’t finish a book is when I’m about 3/4 of the way through and realize that I don’t care what happens to these people, I just want them gone. That happens once or twice a year; I read 4-6 books a week.
This is my mindset, too … though I copied your quote in the middle since I didn’t relate to the first part of it. I’ve been ruthless for as long as I can remember. Honestly, while some may see finishing everything they start as an admirable quality (you persevere, you’re committed, etc.), I see it as having low standards. If you only have 24 hours in your day, don’t fill those hours with low-quality entertainment or education.
Reading over these responses makes me realize that a percentage might be a more meaningful response than a number. I’ll go in later today and see if I can calculate what 9 abandoned books a year converts to in terms of a percentage.
I only ever literally threw one book in the trash, and that was Enough Rope, a short story collection by famed crime writer Lawrence Block. It was all going well until I read a short story that was so disgusting, so outrageously offensive, that I couldn’t justify leaving it for anyone else to read. I am still gobsmacked that any editor let it through.
Probably 8-10 per year. Usually it is because I get bored enough that I lose track of what is happening, so I see no point in continuing after that. Less often, I find the book really stupid or don’t identify at all with any of the characters. A fairly recent example is Ruth Ware’s The It Girl, a so-called thriller or mystery that a friend recommended. I was just glad that the It Girl was dead; I didn’t care who killed her, so I stopped reading with only about 30 pages to go.
It is the only book I have ever thrown out. I normally sell or recycle them.
Looks like I give up on approximately one in every eight books I start reading.
I used to make it a matter of course that if I started a book I would always finish it. Recently, as I have come to the realization that I may only have a limited amount of time left to go through my vast collection of unread books, I’ve decided that if for any reason a book doesn’t hold my interest I will toss it into the donation pile.
In fact, I recently not only stopped reading a book about a third of the way into it, but I took the other unread books by the same author and added them to the donation pile.
I read about 50 a year. I seldom don’t finish a book from my collection or from the library. I am reading books that might be comps for my novel, when I found one of them was not a good match (and not interesting) I trashed it. Virtually, it was a library borrow on my Kindle.
However I judge books for a contest, and get about 100, and I finish only the few that are finalists. I try to give each one 10% before I dump it, but a few are so bad that I only make it through a few pages. Counting them, my nonfinish rate is high.
I kept track of when I bought and finished books back when I was in high school, college, and just started working. At peak I was reading one or two a day. But SF books back then were a lot shorter than they are now, and I did not have that pesky internet vying for my attention. I also bought a lot of anthologies, and I had an index card collection of the stories I owned, so I’d look up the stories in the anthology and not read ones I’d read already. That cut it down by half or more, very often.
With me, with two authors, and the first one was with The First Patient by Michael Palmer, M.D. from 2008; I’ve finished 10 of the medical/hospital thriller novels by that former doctor in the Boston area turned author, who left us in 2013 (from his first book, The Sisterhood, from 1982, to The Fifth Vial from 2007; the first one I read was Flashback from 1988), and up until that point, he had written some involving medical fiction that kept me in it at high-octane all the way through.
The other author was Arthur Hailey, and the ones of his I DNFd were Strong Medicine from 1984, about the American pharmaceutical industry, and The Evening News from 1990, about television news; until those two, he was like Michael Palmer when it came to American industries and the intrigues and other matters around them, and I’ve read 7 of his, from The Final Diagnosis from 1959 (about hospitals) to Overload from 1979 (about the American power industry in California), with In High Places from 1962, Hotel from 1965, Airport from 1968, Wheels from 1971, and The Moneychangers from 1975 in between those two, and those 7, I read because he had an art for researching the industries he wrote about and getting deep down in them to take his readers truly inside those industries they were about, and that’s what kept me in them.
If I start a book, I generally make it to the end. Only a couple of examples to the contrary leap to mind. I remember getting about 100 pages into The Brothers Karamazov before deciding that I was just tired of the whole unpleasant mess. Another book that I gave up on was Fast Food Nation. I don’t know what happened there, because I found it genuinely interesting. It might very well be that a McDonald’s junkie like me didn’t want to learn too much about how it all works.
You just brought back a memory of my senior year in college. I’d just moved out of an “Animal House” frat, into a sweet old lady’s guest room, and one night I looked over at the stack of a dozen books on my bedside table, realizing: “This is wonderful; I can pick up whichever book I’m in the mood for. But I’ll never get them all read… hey, wait, that’s okay!”
So I give up on a lot now. Life’s too short and all that. I “read” audiobooks, so I just take a screenshot on my phone, showing where I stopped. Then I save it to an album titled “Books Given Up On”.
And, yes, I have a separate album of “Books Read” as well…
…now that I’m starting to forget if I’ve already read a book (“Hmm, if he slips on a toy dinosaur, then I’ve read this befo… aha! Well, it’s a good read, I’ll keep going.”).
I will abandon about 1 out of 3. The completist in me always wants to finish it and put in on my shelf and keep it forever and ever and show people and tell people, but I’ve been burned with bad endings to bad books so often I give up now when I stop caring about the story and I read far more often because of this.
I’ve never been able to make it more 30-40 pages into the Bible, despite several earnest attempts.