I used to finish every book I started. I wore it like a virtue. Somewhere around 400 books in, I realized the virtue was mostly stubbornness wearing better clothes, and I quit quitting the habit of never quitting. Now I abandon books freely, and I want to argue for it, with one large exception that I will get to.
The case for stopping is simple arithmetic. If you read for an hour most nights, you will finish maybe 40 books a year. Say you read from 20 to 80. That is 2,400 books, total, for the rest of your life, and that number only shrinks. Every book you finish out of duty is a book you are choosing over one you have not met yet. Guilt says the loss is the abandoned book. Arithmetic says the loss is all the books that abandoned one is standing in front of.
So I stop. When a novel has bored me for 60 pages and shows no sign of turning, I put it down and I do not apologize to it. The book does not know. The author is not watching. The only person the guilt serves is a version of me who confused endurance with taste.
Here is the exception, and it is a real one. I no longer abandon a book that is boring me because it is hard. There is a difference between a book that is failing and a book that is asking something of me that I am not yet willing to give. The two can feel identical from inside chapter 3. Both are unpleasant. Both make you want to reach for your phone. But one is a waste of time and the other is the price of the good stuff, and learning to tell them apart is most of what it means to grow as a reader.
I got this wrong for years in the direction of quitting too early. I abandoned a difficult novel by a Zimbabwean writer, Tendai Moyo, twice, because the first 50 pages withhold almost everything and I mistook the withholding for the author having nothing. The third time I pushed through the wall, and the book opened into one of the best things I have ever read. The difficulty was the door, and I had been standing outside it calling it a wall.
So my rule now has two parts. Abandon a book that is boring you because it is badly made, thin, dishonest, or simply not for you. Keep going a while longer with a book that is boring you because it is difficult, especially if you can feel a real intelligence behind the difficulty even when you are not enjoying it. The tell, for me, is whether the boredom has any tension in it. Bad books bore you slackly. Hard books bore you with a kind of pressure, a sense that something is being held back on purpose. Learn the pressure and you will stop quitting the wrong ones.
None of this is a system, and I distrust anyone who sells reading as a system. Some nights I abandon a genuinely good book because I am tired and it deserves better than a tired reader. I pick it up again in a better season. Books keep, and no relationship with a book has to be finished in one sitting to be finished at all.
What I have let go of entirely is the guilt. A half-read book on the shelf is a conversation I paused, and some conversations are worth pausing forever. The stack of things I abandoned tells a truer story about my taste than the row of things I dutifully finished, because the abandoned ones are where I finally admitted what I actually wanted from a book instead of what I thought I was supposed to want.
Finish the hard ones. Let the boring ones go. And stop keeping score, because the score was never the point, and the reader who counts finished books is measuring the wrong shelf.