Do you usually abandon a boring book or finish it?

as much as i hate to do it, if i feel like it's not going to happen i won't finish it. i'd rather move on to a better book. plus boring books take me longer to get through so if i continue trudging through it's like i'd missing out on reading a couple better books, not just one.

abandoning a boring book is one of the great pleasures of life

the problem is, there are cases (not too many though), when you read what looks like a boring book, but develop into something great later on..

finish, via misplaced work ethic.

Used to be more ruthless about the rupture and therefore abandon, abandon, but now with ebooks, library books, fractured attention span, newfound reappreciation of the genres therefore expanded reading list, etc. plenty of books get started but are neither completed or abandoned, like so many Orson Welles projects waiting for financing to finish.

And yeah what nostormo said.

I usually know whether a book is worth my while pretty quickly, often before I commit to reading it. This has as much to do with my mood and circumstances as it does with the absolute merits of the book. I've rejected or abandoned many a good book as unsuitable to my curernt desires.

For example, I recently abandoned The Recognitions by Wm Gaddis. I kept my copy and may take another run at it some day.

abandon like five for every one I finish

some books I do this because I don't like them, and some because they just don't need to be finished, particularly with non-fiction. Sometimes a book is just an unwieldy and inefficient vehicle for delivering information, and I'd rather glean what I want and move on.

"plenty of books get started but are neither completed or abandoned"

Proust, for me. a project of a life time.

I am eternally grateful to Stephen King for teaching me that it is okay to say "you know what, no" and put down a book without finishing it.

(Gerald's Game, btw)

At some point I realized that, in a certain sense, a novel is just some guy or girl telling you a story, even if it's a literary titan or noted contemporary author. Sometimes those people tell boring stories, or tell them in an uncompelling way. What obligates you to listen to them?

i abandoned Man Without Qualities in my twenties.

turned back to it in my thirties and it became one of my desert island books.

there are also opposite examples.

so it's sometimes hard to tell if you are missing something

Abandoning really late on - this ought to hurt because you've wasted a lot of time on rubbish; but it actually makes me feel like a king, the extravagance of it.

it's not always about the "story" per se
xxpost

i mean, a lot of the novels i like don't have a plot at all: it's not about going forward, but about going deeper (with style).

used to finish all of them, but now i have switched over to the abandon road and its been a good move imo

thanks video games/talking to lunatics in my store for teaching me that some stories arent worth finishing

i guess writing book reviews doesn't help me to take the abandon road too often..

Abandon. I use the 50 page rule.

there was a point where I was hate-reading V. solely because I refused to give the book the satisfaction of making me put it down

i have hate-read books too and find finishing a book simply to be able to hate it more deeply is perfectly rewarding.

This is how I did Ada for the book club. You can go really fast too, 'cos you don't care if you miss stuff.

i've started and abandoned 'v.' at least four times. once i made it past the hundred-page mark, but the last time i only made it to the second chapter. i'm not sure whether it's pynchon's fault or mine that i've never retained anything from any of these readings, apart from the phrase 'human yo-yo' and that scene with the explicit description of what happens during a nose job.

i don't even finish books i like tbh

I only abandon books when I am 100% sure that I could bin it and never look back. I've done it with four books only

THing is I frequwently wind up picking up another book anyway so have several on the go and things I really want to finish take a while since I have started something else. So I already have a lot of half read books lying around. So another one added to the vague pile is nothing special. It is more likely to just never get picked up again, or to wind up getting put down more rapidly a second time. Maybe I should actually get rid of some of them.

i rarely abandon a book because of dislike/boredom/whatever; i usually stick it out. the only one i can remember quitting in the past few years is the second book of the song of ice and fire series, cuz whatever i could be reading ursula k le guin or something right now

i'll be lucky to keep reading a book i'm interested in tbh

Always finish... a good ending can often redeem a book (and film). I'll just read it with slight resentment.

the worst though is getting pretty far into a book, having to set it aside because you're busy or w/e, then letting enough time pass that you feel like you'll have to start again from the beginning to really get back into it. most of the time when i "abandon" (in quotes because i'll get back to it someday, right...) a book it happens this way

I've recently progressed from abandoning books to finishing them at all costs.

Think this has probably got something to do with my recent experiences as a fresh English Lit. graduate, going through the ritual discovery that my degree isn't worth the paper that it's written on.

My dismay at this situation is currently manifesting itself as a stubborn determination that I will finish any book that I set my mind to, because otherwise what the hell have I been doing for the last three years?

The healthy answer to that question is probably that I have gained some of the tools that will allow me to get the most out of the books that I actually am enjoying, but I can't help but view it as a competition between myself and the book right now.

Most recently this involved me picking Sons and Lovers back up after a 2 month hiatus and muscling through the final 150 pages. Haven't yet worked out if it was worth the effort or not.

Fortunately I'm now on to Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullvian and an old Reader's Digest survey of Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain (replete with a rather natty cover design of a Satyr) and I'm enjoying them both quite painlessly.

there was a point where I was hate-reading V. solely because I refused to give the book the satisfaction of making me put it down

Call me at **BITCOIN (DJP) wrote this at 2013-05-01 22:04:03.000

Yeah, Pynchon did this to me too. I felt bad about abandoning Gravitys Rainbow for a while. Nowadays, I have no problem dropping a book if I get bored. But I think I'm reading less fiction because of it, on account of being burned so many times. "Oh yeah, I have 3 unfinished horror/political/post-modern books in my nook archives, odds are in favor of this one joining them..."

life's too short to read garbage. i'll give it at least a few chapters, but if i'm not into it by say chapter four (or chapter six if it's an ebook) it's in the bin.

dog latin otm

I often abandon interesting books in order to move onto more interesting books, thinking i will return to the original book and then forgetting about it.

not novels though, i finish novels for the most part

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

does skipping to the end count as finishing? i couldn't even make it through crying of lot 49.

How I became an abandoner:
When I was a kid I would AGONIZE over not finishing a book – I finished a lot of total garbage out of some sense of duty. Then I read my dad's copy of Embraced By The Light, a near-death experience memoir that he highly recommended. It was kind of hokey to me, even though I was very credulous, but that credulity became an advantage when the author described how every book extant on earth was also in heaven. I felt so relieved! I realized any book that wasn't immediately gripping could be put aside for future reading, way way in the future, in the impossible expanses of post-death eternity. So I guess Heaven's reading hall is where I'll finally finish À rebours.

^^ witnessing how faith can make life better.

oooh à rebours... we had to read that for class, it took me a while but then i was really into it.
to answer the thread's question, i have this horrible urge to always finish the book i'm reading even if i hate it. tbh, i find it easier to finish books i've hated than ones that are just of no interest to me. there's only one novel i've had to put down, that too multiple times - kafka's the castle. for some reason i always struggle with kafka, took all i had to finish the trial too. which i re-read later and came to enjoy. for the castle, i think i tried reading it 3 or 4 times before actually finishing it. actualy, come to think of it there is another book i abandoned about 50-60 pages from the end - dostoevsky's the idiot, but only because i lost my copy of it. maybe one day i'll read it again and hopefully not lose it that time.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

quitters, life is long

All the boring books are in heaven's library. Hell has the good ones with chapters torn out.

I'm worried I've got some deep-seated psychological issue which stops me from reading more than 3/4 of a book: it's only come on in the last few months but it's very real.

I have totally fantasised about dying & going to heaven & heaven is this huge borgesian library with all the books you never got around to reading & you have infinite time to read them all. Even in that situation I would probably still never finish finnegans wake tho.

The outside of our fancy library is emblazoned with a Borges quote "I had always imagined paradise as a library"
Inside is not that many books but there is an aquarium and blurays and Xbox games and these weird MP3 players
preloaded with audiobooks, which makes me think that heavens library is going to end up being a combination Internet cafe/bestbuy where they have to compete with heavens kindles and shifting needs of heavens community.

I'm worried I've got some deep-seated psychological issue
Think I have a shallow-rooted but pervasive issue where if my general mood changes, however subtly, during the course reading of a book I feel like I should put the book aside until the time comes, if ever, when the original mood returns, at which point I will no doubt have to backtrack a few pages to remind me what was going on but theoretically I should be able to continue on down that same stream that supposedly you can't step into twice.