Huge fan of Do Not Finish. There are too many good books out there to waste time with mediocre ones. I’ve noped out of books by my favorite authors. Finishing a book you started because you started it is the perfect example of the sunk cost fallacy.
If I’m in that situation where I really hate the book but also really want to finish, then it’s usually because there’s that nagging mental thread of something left undone.
But I don’t want to read it. I just want to be done with it.
What I need is closure, which means knowing how the key points wrap up and what happens at the end.
And so knowing that, I commit a crime against literature - I skim.
Normally I’d never skim, but it’s far preferable to never finishing at all, and it ties off that unpleasant dangling thread, letting me be free and move on to something I might actually enjoy.
Not exclusively, I have occasionally finished things that were challenging more than enjoyable. But I'm thinking about the content, not that they were just poorly written. Eg books on fgm, holocaust, etc.
Whenever I’ve pushed through and attempted to finish a book that I do not enjoy, I end up shelving reading as a hobby for a long period of time.
So I decided to just stop trying and if I don’t enjoy them, I stop. There are too many good books to read out there for me to try to force feed one to myself.
Exactly. Life is too short to read a boring book. I paid for an audiobook on the Celts, thinking I would learn something about them. I got about a third of the way through and realized I was barely absorbing anything because the author had a boring as fuck style. Don’t give in to the sunk cost fallacy of having spent time and perhaps money on a book.
The only time I read books I don’t like is when I dislike them so much that I want to be able bitch about em on the internet without someone telling me my opinion is invalid because I didn’t finish em.
Enjoy what you enjoy—life’s too short and there are too many other books out there to waste time on what you don’t enjoy! I have no qualms about not finishing a book, no matter how far along I’ve gotten. I’ve been known to skip to the last chapter or last few pages just to see how it ends, then move on.
On the other hand, for books that you have to read (for school, e.g.) set a goal of X pages per day, and reward yourself when you make the goal. I also find it helps to read more interactively: take notes, argue with the author, think about what you read and whether it’s total b.s. or whether there was anything, however small, of value in it.
I've even read philosophical works that go against what I think and feel and spend the entire time arguing with someone who has probably been dead for hundreds of years.
But I enjoy that from time to time to keep my mind sharp.
No point in reading something that doesn't grab you and resonate with you. Life is too short to put myself through that.
I say don’t force yourself. Why force yourself to do a leisure time activity you aren’t enjoying? Sometimes stuff we learn from is boring, sure, but there are endless things to learn. You’ll also learn more if you’re enjoying the topic.
Often, I don’t. If I think there is a good chance of a payoff, though… I start skimming the crap. I’ve learned to skim through stuff until something of import comes up, and then I step back a couple paragraphs and start reading again.
I don’t know how you’d learn this, but I learned it back in high school when I needed to find information in the textbook quickly, but couldn’t afford to actually read every page on the way. It was massively successful back then, and now both.
If after skimming like 1/4 of a book I haven’t found anything interesting again, I almost always quit, though. It’s really unlikely that a book with that much content that I don’t care about will have anything that I value later.
That said… I have skimmed entire books on re-read. Some of the middle Wheel of Time books, for example. And some were so bad that I just read a summary, instead of skimming. But I like the first books enough that it was worth it for the ending, which was decent, but not mind-blowing like I’d hoped. (I “re-read” them when the later books finally came out and I wanted a refresher.)
Oh Wheel of Time. I love them for the most part, but I just couldn’t care less about a whole book of Elaine playing politics for the Lion Throne. Then there was the book that was mostly just devoted to taking care of a drought. I get the latter is the Dark One’s shadow falling on the world and all, but the boredom it invoked felt like the Dark One’s shadow on my mind.
Not every book will be enjoyed by every reader. I DNF once I realize the book is just not my cup of tea. I just checked and of the 15 books I started this year, I dropped 4 at some point. Sometimes I hate-read a book. That happens when I find the book annoying, but it still has something to keep me going on. I am enjoying it to some degree, while also being angry at it.
In any case, if reading the book feels like a drag, close it and open another book. Maybe you abandon the book forever, maybe you pick it up a year from now and plow through it. Both are fine.
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