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Giving Up On Books
by
Steve Leveen
When I interview people about their
reading and ask, “Do you give up on a book you don’t like?” people
usually get a pained expression and say something like, “Well I’d like to
be able to give up.
I should give up. But I find it hard to.”
Ring a bell? It’s the reading equivalent of
the clean-your-plate syndrome.
Perhaps it goes back to school days. Our teachers
assigned books that we had better finish
if we wanted a good
grade. And we had to read
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“Many professional
readers apply the
50-page rule. If the book hasn’t grabbed them
by then, they give it the heave-ho.”
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book before we could have another
(the
clean-your- plate-or-no dessert syndrome).
Yet
many of the professional readers I’ve interviewed—book reviewers, editors
and booksellers—do give up on books. They have retrained
themselves. They don’t give up tentatively and regretfully but deliberately and decisively. And they consider
it one of the most important reading skills they’ve learned.
The prevalence of this
skill among professional readers has made me wonder whether those who give
up on the most books might also be those who finish the most.
(Didn’t Babe
Ruth lead the league in strikeouts as well as home runs?)
The
wisdom of giving up on books is compelling. New York University professor
Atwood H. Townsend wrote in his Good Reading: A Helpful Guide for
Serious Readers, “Never force yourself to read a book that you do not enjoy. There
are so many good books in the world that it is foolish to waste time on
one that does not give you pleasure and profit.”
Townsend penned that advice in the 1930s, when
America was producing some 10,000 books a year. Today the number is more
like 150,000. Compare that with an active reading schedule of 50 or so
books a year and, well, numbers talk.
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“Consider wine
tastings. Do we finish the whole bottle for each wine we sample?
Tastings wouldn’t get very far if we did.”
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To help them know when to give up, many professional
readers apply the 50-page rule. If the book hasn’t grabbed them by then,
they give it the heave-ho. Nancy Pearl, the librarian and author of Book
Lust, reports that some people take this rule further and subtract a page
for every year of age over 50. This way a 75-year old would give a book
only 25 pages to prove itself. As readers mature they become
quicker and surer judges of what they like.
Most of us give up on
people faster than books. Imagine you’re at a cocktail party and the first
person you chat with turns out to be a stupendous bore. Do you keep
talking to him for the next hour because you started with him? To the
contrary, you suddenly develop a passionate interest in the spinach dip
across the room and excuse yourself.
Or consider wine tastings.
Do we finish the whole bottle for each wine we sample? Tastings wouldn’t
get very far if we did.
To be fair, some books do
take effort to understand and appreciate. I’m thinking of philosophy and
science and James Joyce, for example. Some readers claim you learn most
from the books you struggle with. But for the majority of books that people open, I’m
beginning to think we would benefit by turning the usual finish fetish on
its head.
Instead of feeling guilty about giving up on a
book, we could set out to give up on, say, a dozen books a year with the
understanding that if we don’t do this, we’re just not tasting enough
books. And these aren’t just any books but highly recommended books we
thought we might really like. If we took this approach, wouldn’t the books
we do finish be far more rewarding for us?
Perhaps we should
hold book tastings. Better yet, book and wine tastings together. Yum!
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Reader’s Question: Do you give up on books you
don’t like?
Please click here to respond.
If you read this column, you
just got a taste for some of the topics covered in my new book,
The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life.
It’s being published this May. You can reserve your copy now, through Amazon.com, your nearest independent bookstore (via BookSense.com), or other booksellers.
Simply request The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life (Levenger Press, hardcover, $17.50).
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