Everything is coming to a ...

[threemonkeys]

So at what point should you stop reading a book you aren't enjoying? Over the years, like many people, I got pretty stubborn reading books and tried to read all my way through once I have started. But in recent times I have been telling myself to stop if I'm not enjoying a book. Its that whole "life is too short" argument. On the other hand, you have got to give a book a fair go. Even if you don't like the first few pages, that does not mean the book won't develop and become something really good. So to rephrase the question - how much leeway do you give a bad book to come right? Is there a minimum page count? Perhaps there is a minimum percentage you should read.

There are complicating factors to this question. Is the book highly recommended by your friends or reviewers etc? Is it supposed to be a classic? Do you have some sort of review obligation? Then there is the reason that it isn't good for you. If it is highly offensive then you are likely to stop much more quickly than if it is just dull. Or perhaps not - offensive but well written can still be compelling.

These thoughts were triggered by The Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko. I had it quite strongly recommended to me by several people. Yet, 40 pages in I was ready to give it away. It wasn't that it was bad, it was just too blandly generic. It seemed to be just another vampire/magician hunting thing with nothing about the writing that added depth to the setting - no humour, no sense of setting, no depth of character. Not badly written, just nothing to engage with.

I thought I'd give it a few more pages. At the 70 page mark I put it down again thinking again that I had had enough. Then in a moment of extreme laziness I figured that I couldn't be bothered walking through to another room to get another book so why don't I give this another go - after all 100 pages seemed to be a good round number to say that I had given the book a fair go. Next time I noticed I was on page 140 and engaged. So I finished the book.

It didn't turn into a great work. The setting and characters developed just enough to hold my interest. As a work it has too much of the dance to a mysterious hidden plan style to really satisfy me. The point is that it did prove readable. So re-asking the original question - at what point should you stop reading a book you aren't enjoying?

Comments

[russellk.livejournal.com]

I'm a sucker. If I start, I'm usually drawn in enough to finish. I've only given up on four books in my life. Oddly, the fourth was last week - Hal Duncan's 'Vellum', which I found risibly inaccurately constructed from the kabbalic sources and spliced together with no thought for story, concerned only with artifice. Must be why it's been nominated for a Nebula award.

[threemonkeys.livejournal.com]

I didn't get more than a chapter into Vellum. That makes it a book I consider postponed rather than given up on because a chapter isn't really enough to tell how a book may end up. But it has been in that state for a while now and I have no desire to pick it up again.