How much to read before giving up on a book?

[Razeus]

How much do you give a book a chance to get good before giving up on it. Some books are more challenging than others, and therefore I give them more time to get into it before calling it quits on it. Life is short and I'm sure there are much more entertaining and enlightening books to be read. I always love it when I book grabs me from the first chapter (like my current reads of Invisible Man and The Corrections), but 1984 took some effort.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

I usually read at least a fifth before putting it down.

[TheChilly]

How much do you give a book a chance to get good before giving up on it. Some books are more challenging than others, and therefore I give them more time to get into it before calling it quits on it. Life is short and I'm sure there are much more entertaining and enlightening books to be read. I always love it when I book grabs me from the first chapter (like my current reads of Invisible Man and The Corrections), but 1984 took some effort.

A notable book that I gave up on before the end of the first half was "Bad Love" by Jonathan Kellerman. Not because it was poorly written (though decently written), but because nothing happened anywhere in its first half. NOTHING.

[Paulclem]

My wife recently gave me book she had borrowed from the library and said - "Tell me what you think of that".

I read the first 5 pages and wanted to throw the book through the window - his tone was so patronising and overtly literary - it was a detective novel from the 70's. If it's the style, then it's fairly easy to decide as in the above example.

If it's something to do with a hackneyed regurgitation of worn out plots and characterisation - then it might take a chapter or two to decide that you've read it before. I get this feeling with Dean Koonz now that I've read a few of his books. They are great as page turners, but the baddies are invariably super egos and super bad whilst the goodies are super good, honest, decent people. There's no subtlety - which works with a page turner thriller, but it does become tiresome to read the same kind of stuff in just a different context.

As for literary novels - well I think you have to decide fairly early on what type of book you like. I dislike Austen - I have no interest in novels of manners - though i appreciate that they have merit. As you say, time is short, and a bit of choosing time is worth it usually.

[Scheherazade]

How much do you give a book a chance to get good before giving up on it. I give it until I can read it no more.

[XQZ]

If it has a slow start I'll still try for a chapter a day, sometimes more. This is because I believe that one should always make an attempt on the classics, whether proven to be by other readers, or generally from experience of the author's previous books.
When I first read David Copperfield (ten years ago now). it was strictly one chapter a day, but when I re-read it two years ago it was in two sittings, and ten times better than I remembered it.

[IceM]

I go about halfway. Catch 22 did that to me; although I love the humor, the overall novel couldn't drive me forward.

[kiki1982]

I never give up, or tend not to for the simple reason that, if I do give up, it is a dead cert that I will never ever finish it. I am a person who firmly makes up her mind about something after a serious impression and rarely changes it. The result is that, if I do not like a book such that I give it up, the impression has been formed...

I rarely re-read too, so that's probably got something to do with it...

I do an awfully long time over it if I do lumber through though, but it is better than nothing.

[mal4mac]

I gave up on Don Quixote, but ten years later found a better translation, or had become a more skilled reader, and read it with great enjoyment. If I'd slogged through the bad translation (or my lack of maturity) then the impression of "too boring, too difficult" might have been hammered into my brain, and I would perhaps never have returned to the book.

That said, I think you should make a serious attempt to read through the boredom when confronted by an acknowledged classic. Keep thinking 'it might get better' and it just might - if it's an acknowledged classic. This worked for me with Tom Jones, and is now working with Moby Dick. The long philosophical & biological asides might inspire you to quit, but they may be compensated for by the literary riches (and pure entertainment!) just over the horizon. Doesn't always work though - with Proust I just couldn't force myself to go further than half-way.

In the case of 1984, keep going! It's short and fairly easy to read. It might be incredibly drab, and not great as literature or entertainment, but the ideas are central to modern identity - Big Brother, doublethink, newspeak.... (you can quite happily avoid Orwell's other novels though...)

"The Corrections" is a difficult case. I was also grabbed by the first chapter, but it was then downhill from there. Around page 100 I was asking myself if I should quit, but used my 'riches over the horizon?' argument and kept going .. downhill all the way... I ended up reading it all and wishing I hadn't. That's why I now make the caveat of only trying to keep going if it's *really* a classic, where there's a *good* chance of hidden treasure.

[sithkittie]

I usually stick it through, unless it's abysmal. I've given up after the first chapter before, but only when it's really really. I got through about the first 100 pages of Sword of Shannara before I put that one down too. Though I have read all the way through some really bad stories, either because I was bored (Twilight) or because I was hoping for some improvement (Dark Tower).

Some books are worth the fight. It took me all of junior high and a year of high school to make it through A Tale of Two Cities. I quit at least four times, usually after realizing I didn't have a clue what the first two or three chapters were saying. 1984 was a bit dry but worth it in the end I thought. Both books were.. though I wouldn't call 1984 a favorite, just really good.

[Emil Miller]

I think one's attitude on this subject changes as one gets older, and a distinction should be made between fiction and factual works. As a young reader, I would read novels without bothering unduly whether I would like them or not. With the passage of time, I realised that some of them stayed in the memory while others didn't, so I became more selective.
As has been stated, there seems little point in wasting time reading books that could be spent more advantageously on others.
One way of avoiding this is to decide which type of books suit your temperament and avoiding those that don't. I have made it a rule never to read best sellers until enough time has elapsed to show that they might have some merit other than notoriety. On the few books that I have given up on, I have read roughly halfway before abandoning them.

[MarkBastable]

About three paragraphs.

[keilj]

If it's anything by James Joyce, just a few pages is enough

[Emil Miller]

If it's anything by James Joyce, just a few pages is enough

This is what I mean by choosing books to which one is temperamentally suited. I haven't read James Joyce and I don't intend to. Why? Because I have read plenty about his work on this forum and nothing has convinced me that I would enjoy reading him.

[Jozanny]

Razeus, you ask a difficult question with no easy answer for any of us, as there are extremes at any end, whether commercial genre or literary.

I try not to abandon authors, but do if I make a mistake, and I'm difficult to please. I like mine on the heavy side, but not maudlin. The Tin Drum is a perfect example, and if the LNF is any indicator, I am in the minority there.

Menippean forms, like Swift, drive me crazy. Do I abandon? Depends. The Russians, possibly excepting Gogol, drive me crazy, and I did, naughty me, abandon Notes from the Underground.

I am predisposed to hate mystery, romance, thrillers, and this new thing, the American Christian genre. I cannot get past 1/3 of this, and it illustrates the evil of genre marketing pressuring hacks to over-sop their dinner rolls with gravy, as being religious, or spiritual, isn't a hall pass for colorless platitudes, of which Keene and Collins and their ilk are guilty, and if I had paid money for them I might have daydreamed of suing Amazon over lack of quality control.

But for an intellectual writer, abandonment is tricky, whether the work is bad, or flawed, or a matter of taste.

[PeterL]

There's a lot of variability in that. There was one book that I found abandoned in a house when I moved in. I started it and made it to the third page. Thaere were notes in the book about how bad it was. I'm sure that it was published only because the author was married to a justly famous writer. There have been others that I managed to get ten or twenty pages in before I found them too bad to bear. SOmetimes have been about to toss something aside when it started to improve. (Note to self: Make sure that some interesting action starts before page twenty.) Then there have baan a few where I wondered how I managed to get the whole way through. I don't let it bother me if I quit reading something.