Should I finish the book?

There has been a bit of a debate going on over the summer and it is still rumbling on into the autumn about whether readers should finish every book they start reading. When I was young I was an avid reader, and I am amazed looking back at what I read and how much I read. I would go to the library several times a week and would borrow my mum’s tickets as well so I could go into the adult library as well as the children’s section. I kept a little book and wrote down every single book I read, and I did this for several years; of all the rubbish I have kept, sadly I didn’t keep these books which would have been so interesting and useful.

If I started reading a  book, then no matter how boring it was, or how much I didn’t like it, I would finish it. The only think which ever defeated me, and I did feel very guilty about it, was Rob Roy, by Sir Walter Scott. I read hundreds of books a year then, and I have continued to be an avid reader, although I am too busy to read as much as I used to.

At some point, and it was fairly recently, say in the last ten years, I decided that really, I did not have to finish every single book I started. I guess it began with a book (and i don’t remember which)  that was so badly written and so dire that I just didn’t want to waste those hours of my life following the unbelievable characters through their predictable lives… and I stopped reading it. I actually felt really guilty. This was the habit of a lifetime of reading that I was breaking!

Since that first decision not to finish a book I had started, I have done it several more times. I am not a lazy reader; I still read long and difficult stuff which I have to work at, I’m not going to casually chuck something aside because it has page after page of description, or it has complex arguments or convoluted story-lines. I still do make every effort to finish a book, I really do, but if it is really, really not interesting – or worse, if it is actually really, really boring, if it is badly written, if it is about events which I don’t want to read about (I am a bit of a squeamish reader and particularly dislike graphic and gratuitous violence) if it insults my intelligence, if it is pretentious, if it is factually incorrect through careless writing or because the writer is actually stupid (yes there are stupid writers) if it is shouting at me, bashing me over the head with words, if it is so complicated and tortuous it needs extensive notes to keep track of it all… if at the end of the page I actually for no reason just don’t like it… then I close it, and say goodbye. But I still feel guilty!