Do You Finish Every Book You Start?

A few days ago a friend of mine came to visit and when she saw the many books I’ve accumulated on my various shelves since the last time she was here, she asked me “Do you finish every book you start? When will you get through all these books in your house?”

Actually this is a question that many real book readers are struggling with regularly (including me). Now there are really two camps about this: one who has to finish a book once started, no matter how bad the book turns out to be, and the other who only finishes a book if it’s good, leaving the rest unfinished. Of course this second camp can go through a huge bookshelf much faster than the first.

So where do I stand? Years and years ago I was reading every book I started, even if I literally hated it, or got me boring to tears. At some point, however, I realized that I were amassing more books (through buying, trading and library loaning) than I would ever get to – and authors wouldn’t stop writing books just because I couldn’t keep up!

So I made the painful (at the time) decision to let go of a book if it didn’t speak to me.

And let me tell you, I never regretted this decision and that’s what I still do. If I pick up a book and it doesn’t get me excited at around page 100, the book goes to the “can’t bother with” shelf until I have enough of them to bring them to the local church charity bookshop. If it’s a virtual bookshelf with Kindle books or other eBooks, I just delete it from my device.

Not only that, but since I started this blog, I decided that even if I get a book to read and review, I will not review it if I can’t finish it, it’s just not fair, not to the author and not to the blog readers. That’s why you won’t ever find on this site a review of a book that sucked really bad.

Of course this also brings me to another question – how can I finish all the books I already have on my shelf? And how can you?

Well, with this system of read 100 pages and decide to continue reading or I move on has already helped me make a small dent in my huge TBR shelves. However I still have around 1000 books at home (I used to have over 2000, but at some point I gave away about half of them when a very charitable mood struck me).

And one day I just had an epiphany. It is OK to not read all the books on the already overflown shelves. It is ok if the room looks like a well worn out library or a warehouse for the matter. I simply gave myself the permission to read as many books I can and not stress about the rest. And so can you – if you have too many books at home, it’s ok to let go of some of them. As I mentioned before, authors won’t stop writing and there will be always more books to read than you will ever manage to do in this lifetime.

So how do you deal with books that you’ve started reading? Do you finish every book you start, even if it badly sux?

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