Abandoned!

Abandoned.  Such a terrible word.  It conjures up images.  A baby in a blanket in a basket at the door of the church.  The empty shell of a house no longer wanted.  A vacant lot collecting weeds and litter.  Yet it's the word that comes to mind when I decide to "let a book go."

I used to feel guilty for not reading every book I buy.  It seemed like a waste of money.  Then one day a lightbulb went off in my head and I realized life is too short to read lousy books when there are so many good ones out there waiting to be read.  It's a waste of time to force myself to read something simply because I paid for it.

My rule of thumb is to give the author at least 10% of the length of the book to hook me.  If they haven't succeeded by then, I'm done with the book. This past week I had to abandon Calvino's Six Memos for the New Millennium (see this post for reference).  It was simply too literary, too erudite, for my tastes.  At least I hadn't paid full price for it.  I typically go for the cheapest copy of a book I can get my hands on (as long as it's in pretty good condition).  That helps to mitigate the guilt of letting one go.  (And it leaves more funds for other books.)  Plus, if I can recycle the abandoned book by giving it away, selling it, or trading it, that also helps diminish the guilt.

One might wonder, why not just check books out of the library?  That would be a great solution to the risk of buying boring books if it weren't for the fact that (a) frequently what I want to read is not available when I want it and (b) I usually can't finish a book before it's due back at the library.  I read too many books in parallel, so even if I'm finishing a lot of books each individual book is taking me a good while to finish.

Once in a great while I will abandon a book and return to it at a later date and read it after all.  That's what happened with The Ruins by Scott Smith.  I gave it 50 pages and then stopped, noting "Just couldn't get into it.  A group of stupid people, and not much happening except they don't quite know what they're doing or where they're going.  So what?"  But when I tried again a couple of years later - just before a trip to the Yucatan peninsula - I got engrossed in it and really enjoyed it.