My rule is that you can’t drop a book until you’ve read at least as much as the most you’ve told someone else to read before giving up on something you’ve loved. Saying “Oh, Wheel Of Time is GREAT once you’ve slogged through the first three shitty tomes!” means you are fucked by this rule.
I am also pushing fifty and have read a lot, life’s too goddamn short to not give up a book the moment you stop giving any fucks about it.
"life’s too goddamn short to not give up a book the moment you stop giving any fucks about it."
I read a lot, but have a lot less time for it since I started biking to work instead of taking the train. This is best viewed IMHO as making the best/most efficient use of a scarce resource. If you are really just dragging through a book because you don't enjoy it, or its tedious, just drop it. When I read a truly great book, it sticks with me forever, its a shame that I hadn't read it earlier.
FWIW, Wheel of Time is actually what made me ok with dropping books/series. That series was just an enormous drain of my time, and personally, I thought it was really poorly written and excessively long- I stopped caring for the characters and secretly hoping even my "favorite" characters would die just so we could get on with things. After the end of Book 7 I just said enough is enough, I am accumulating a pile of books I actually want to read and just dragging through these 1000+ page slogfests because of stubbornness about finishing what I started. Tugs BraidSmooths Skirt
> "I read a lot, but have a lot less time for it since I started biking to work instead of taking the train."
If you're not adverse to wearing ear buds while biking (I know some people are, for situational awareness reasons) I recommend using FBReader with the TTS plugin for 'reading' ebooks when you can't have your eyes on the screen. I do this while running. The computer voice is offputing for an hour or two but if you push through that it becomes a great way to get through books using time that would have otherwise been book-free.
Real audiobooks are fine when available but the selection is very limited. Many books worth reading have never been narrated.
There is also the trouble of "A/V sync", wherein you want to mix reading the book with listening to the book. You can do this with some proprietary solutions like Kindle if you purchase both the ebook and get the audio book, but this is again limiting.
Yeah, entertainment's purpose is to entertain. If it fails to do that in the beginning, it's not for you.
The whole you have to watch/read/listen to X amount before passing judgment is bullshit. If I surround a chocolate cake in three inches of shit, no one will fault you for not eating through the shit just to get to the cake. It might be a good cake. It might be the best cake. But I'm not chowing through three inches of shit just to get it.
Maybe next time, don't cover your cake in shit and see how that goes.
This doesn't hold in all cases. One of my all time favorite books is Catch-22. That was an absolute slog to complete when I first read it in university and I considered abandoning it several times. However the ending surprised me and I went on to reevaluate the entire story with fresh eyes. Plenty of novels (and other media now that I think of it) require long setups for a sufficiently sophisticated punch.
If you're reading purely for entertainment you're entering the act with a bunch of expectation baggage (and probably looking over some worthwhile literature in the process).
I am also pushing fifty and have read a lot, life’s too goddamn short to not give up a book the moment you stop giving any fucks about it.