I rarely give up on a book once I’ve started reading.; it seems so unfair to the author. In fact, I will usually finish a book even if I dislike it just to try and discover something redeemable about it, or at least to figure out why the book didn’t work for me. This is especially true when a work has had glowing reviews. For example, this week I slogged through Tao Lin‘s much praised Taipei even though it struck me that it seemed not so much a novel as a poorly disguised journal.
Goodreads has created an interesting infographic called “The Psychology of Abandonment” that features reasons why readers abandon books in mid-read.
What’s your view on book rejection? Do you ever just give up on a book? How often do you ditch a read?
Travel Between The Pages 
I’ve seen this thing before, but it is very interesting. I try not to ditch books, even if I dislike them, but sometimes I just find I forget to keep reading them – I guess it’s bound to happen when I read several books simultaneously. Interestingly, Catch-22 (which is on that list) is my fave ever book, yet one book I have given up on (twice) is the next book that author wrote, called Something Happened (I got more than halfway through, realised the title had lied to me, and stopped reading).
More often if I intensely dislike a book, I will probably finish it. But this rarely happens.
Interesting that two books I enjoyed very much (Gilbert and Larsson) are two of the most abandoned books! I try and struggle through to the end. The three hardest books for me have been Vanity Fair, The Art of War and War & Peace. In all three, the pace dragged or the number of characters got confusing.