Booking Through Thursday is a weekly meme about (mostly) books and reading. This weeks question is:
If you’re not enjoying a book, will you stop mid-way? Or do you push through to the end? What makes you decide to stop?
I will definitely stop reading a book if I'm not enjoying it. I have way too many books I want to read to waste time on one that's just not doing anything for me. I don't have a particular cut off point as to how far I'll continue before stopping but I do try to give all books a fair chance. I know I've read books that have took until half way to get into but then I've ended up liking it. At the same time, I can think of a few books that I've not been able to make it past the first few pages.
As most people probably do, I do make more effort with books I've been sent for review. I think if a publisher or author has been kind enough to send me the book then I should at least do my best to actually read it - or at least enough of it to be able to still write an informed review and give good reasons why I didn't finish it.
With some books, instead of actually just giving up on them I'll put them to one side for a bit and have another try at a later date (could be a few weeks or years). This is when I can tell that the book is actually something I'd like but I'm just not in the right mood/frame of mind to read it at that particular time. Skim reading the rest of the book is another option if I'm interested enough in finding out what happens at the end.
What makes me decide to stop? Well, mostly the thing that makes me decide to stop is if I'm finding other things to do instead of read it or if it's taking a long time to read because I can only get through a few pages at a time. I've usually got a few books on the go at once and if I find that I'm constantly not picking a certain one then that's also a reason not to continue.
Occasionally there will be something that will annoy me enough to stop straight away though. This is most likely to be the writing style. I can remember one book I picked up from the library that was written in first person present tense and I just could not get my head around it so stopped after about a chapter. Books that are too descriptive and flowery put me off and it's sad to say but some books just have really bad grammar and I can't cope with that.
All in all, knowing that there's other books out there I could be enjoying is a good enough reason for me to not continue reading something I'm not enjoying.
