Abandon books freely and stop apologising

Finishing something you dislike teaches you nothing except to avoid starting the next one.

Somewhere in school most of us absorbed the idea that starting a book creates an obligation to finish it. It does not. Nobody is marking this. The only thing that a grim, dutiful slog through four hundred pages reliably produces is a longer gap before you pick up the next thing, because your body now associates reading with homework. Every abandoned book you feel guilty about is quietly taxing your future reading. The guilt is doing no good to anybody, least of all to the book, which does not know and would not mind. It is a habit of mind picked up in a classroom and carried into a part of life where it has no business being.

Give yourself a rule so the decision is not agonising each time. Some people use a page count. Some read until they notice they have not thought about it in three days, and take that as the answer. The exact rule does not matter; having one does, because it converts a small recurring guilt into a routine administrative act. Put it aside. It is not a failure of yours or the author's. It is a mismatch, and mismatches are the ordinary case, not the exception. The same book will be exactly right for somebody else, and might even be right for you in five years.

There is a real freedom in this that goes beyond one book. Once abandoning is easy, starting becomes cheap, and once starting is cheap you will try far more things than you otherwise would. That is how people find the unexpected favourite, which almost never arrives through careful selection. It arrives because someone picked up nine things they were unsure about and one of them turned out to be the book of their year. You cannot get that outcome while treating every start as a contract. The people who read the widest are almost always the people who quit the most freely.