The Gift Of Abandonment
I still remember the first time I admitted defeat and put down a book I wasn’t enjoying without finishing it. I was 10 years old, and I’d brought Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth home from school. I don’t really remember the experience of sitting down with it or the moment when I realised I wasn’t going to finish it. I just remember that I hated it, with a burning passion I’d never before felt. I wanted, for the first time in my life, to do anything other than to continue reading.
Though my parents aren’t religious I was sent to Catholic school, where a large chunk of my education was dedicated to learning how to feel guilty. Guilt and shame are powerful motivators, and the Catholic church excels at instilling them in children. I carried the guilt of not finishing that book for years. I felt like a failure, like I’d done something bad, like I’d promised this book - like I’d promised Norton Juster personally - that I’d read it, and had let them both down.
There are a handful of other books that have defeated me over my life, and until recently I could name them all. Thomas Hardy’s Far From The Madding Crowd. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. The Lord Of The Rings (a particularly shameful one, given that I make my living working in a field that very much stands on Tolkien’s shoulders). Dune.
When I was 18 I went to university to study English literature, where I promptly began forcing myself to read books I really disliked in order to be able to write about them. Most people who’ve studied lit will tell you it killed their love of reading, at least for a little while. I dropped out of that degree, largely due to (at the time) undiagnosed ADHD, and went to work in a chocolate shop. After a few years I found my love of reading again, and I decided to go back and finish my degree.
Rinse, repeat. The second time around I actually graduated - with a First, no less - but the feeling of “do I actually enjoy reading?” came back hard. Then, two years later, I went to do a Masters in Creative Writing, and once again I found myself in familiar territory.
Nothing will kill your love of reading more than forcing yourself to read things you don’t like. Nothing.
A couple of years ago I did some maths. There are something like 440,000 new fiction books published each year (even more if you include self-published work, and there’s no reason not to other than that I don’t have those figures to hand). I average about a page a minute when I’m reading, which means I read 60 pages an hour. An average novel tends to around 3-400 pages. If we call it 300 pages to make the maths easier, that means I can read an average fiction novel in 5 hours.
If I were a frictionless sphere in a perfect vacuum (by which I mean if I didn’t need to eat and sleep and shit and exercise and work and all the other things humans do, and could simply do nothing but read for 24 hours a day every single day for the rest of my life) I could read around 1,747 novels a year. That’s just novels, that’s not including anything else I might want to read. I’m 37 now and the average life expectancy in the UK is something like 81 years, which gives me 44 years left. That’s another 76,868 novels I could potentially read in my life, if I were a perfect frictionless sphere designed for the sole purpose of reading.
Now, obviously I’m not ever going to want to read every single book that comes out each year. But even if I only wanted to read 1% of all the novels that were released in a given year, with no re-reads of old favourites and no reading already extant books that I haven’t got around to yet (RIP, classics), I’d still never get close to touching the ~4,400 new books I might want to read each year. And that’s while reading at a literally impossible rate.
Life is, literally, too short to read everything you might want to read. Which means it’s definitely too short to read things you don’t enjoy.
I’ve already accepted that it’s fine for me to abandon books, but this year I’m taking it further. I’m encouraging myself to abandon them. In much the same way as slush readers for magazines (a job I did very briefly many years ago) are often looking for literally any reason to reject a story, I’m now gleefully waiting for the moment where I ask “do I actually want to continue with this?” so that I can put the book down and read something else instead.
No more wasting my time on Just Okay Books. I am giving myself the gift of only finishing things I’m fully invested in.
Last year I DNFd a couple of novels early on, and it disheartened me to the point where I didn’t read anything for a few months. It wasn’t until towards the end of the year when I started to read voraciously again. I’m not letting that happen this year.
So far this year I’ve DNFd four books. It should have been five, really. I’m still carrying a little bit of guilt over them, still thinking “maybe I should have given it a chance” about them - especially one, which I was really looking forward to and really enjoying for about 20 pages before I got deeply, irrevocably bored. One I gave up on at the 60% mark, and had to remind myself of the sunk cost fallacy as I was deleting it from my Kindle and downloading the next book on my TBR list. But I’m also really loving the books that I’m seeing through to the end - and I’m appreciating them more because I haven’t just chosen to pick them up in the first place, I’ve made the active decision with every turn of the page to keep reading, to choose this over something else.
Give yourself the gift of abandonment. I expect that when I look back at 2024’s reading journal in a year’s time that I’ll find it was the best decision I ever made.