So, how long does it take you to decide if you are done with a book, calling it quits? Me, I’m a very reluctant quitter. This is not any kind of a hard work ethic, I am simply all too prone to the belief that others know better than I. I must not be getting it, I think, then soldier on. After a disaster with a Dorothy Sayers mystery that involved intricate timetables for trains that I slogged through while on holiday last summer (On holiday! Think of all the other books I could have curled up with! I carted a box of books to the east coast and they languished while I plodded on and on and on with this awful thing.), I swore that I would never, ever waste time on a book that was not working.
I lied. I still find it very hard to give up on a book.
Well, Nancy Pearl, the only librarian to have her own action figure, has dictated from on high that I can quit after 50 pages. Check out her article in The Globe today.
Nathalie Foy 
I’m just off to read the Pearl, but my friend Peter has always worked by the 50 page rule as well and I think it’s a pretty good one. I did hear the other day of some who suggested that you should take your age from one hundred and use that figure, in which case the 50 page rule only works if you’re fifty. I suppose the idea is that as you get older you have less time to give to poor writing, or perhaps it is that as you become a more experienced reader you can recognise a mistake sooner. This was always an issue when I was teaching young children because in some schools I worked in the policy was that they had to read every word. What better way to destroy reading forever? I always ignored it (that’s what policies are for, after all) and let them put it down if they could explain to me why they didn’t like it – good for the development of reasoning and speaking skills as well.
That subtraction formula is in Pearl’s article. It rather burst my bubble; I’ve been thinking that when I’m 60, 70, 80, beyond, I won’t be worried about wasting my time on a bad book because I will have oodles of time…
I can’t remember the last book I actually abandoned mid-read. There are plenty of times when I’ll pick up a book from my shelves, read the first page or two, and decide it’s not actually what I’m in the mood for *now*, or times when I’ll pick up a book at the library and decide I’m not actually interested in checking it out (which sometimes means “I’m not in the mood for this now” and sometimes means “I don’t think I will ever want to read this.”) But once I start reading a book, I almost always finish it. I think partly it’s that I’ve gotten good at recognizing what I like/what I’m in the mood for, partly it’s wanting to give the book a chance, and partly it’s that I’m a quick reader so I figure I might as well carry on.
I’m a quick reader too, but only of books I like! That’s why I get so annoyed when I get stuck on a book I’m not enjoying. It slows everything down.
I used to alway finish the book – no matter what. Now I subscribe to the 50 page rule. I rarely have to enforce it but when I do, I am glad for it.
I’m going to implement it this year. Life is too short for train timetables….
One of my favourite books, _A Prayer for Owen Meaney_, I almost put down. It didn’t get interesting or engaging until about the 70th page, and then I couldn’t put it down.
I realized that John Irving was frontloading so much of the subtext in those first pages that the reader easily got overwhelmed or lost. It was like dumping all the puzzle pieces on the floor: nothing makes sense, it’s all a bit of a chaos, lots of bits don’t make sense because they’re upside down. But if you paid attention, when that first piece fell and then the next one, you start to see something else.
Having said that, I also read a Dorothy Sayers crime novel this summer, or tried to for about 50 pages of elaborately detailed descriptions of church bells and church bell music. But it was summer so I put it down.
Maybe there is an exception for more literary type works.
I think I might have liked church bells… Too bad about the Dorothy Sayers, though. I loved her _Gaudy Night_. We must be picking the wrong titles.
These days, I quit shortly after I feel as though I want to. Plain and simple. I give it a few more pages and if it doesn’t grab me or I dislike the writing, I close it. Sometimes, I’ll flip ahead and read a section and if it grabs me I might change my mind. But that rarely happens. I admit this business of disliking a book enough to want to stop hadn’t happened to me much at all before getting books from publishers or having joined a book club. But I find myself impatient now. There are far too many good books waiting!