Stop Reading Books You Don’t Like
Some people know how to ditch a book as soon as they stop liking it. But many of us feel a kind of compliitistic pressure to stick to every book we start, even when we’re reading for fun. We struggle with things we don’t really like, so we’re less likely to pick up a book and more likely to pick up a phone. We start reading less.
If you want to be able to read more books, try to quit the one you are reading. If he doesn’t call you every minute of your absence, you might want to leave him and find the right book. In fact, if a book tires you with two (or five, or ten) pages in a row, ditch it. Move on. If you’re wondering what happened next, you can always come back.
The catch is that as soon as you drop a book, you need to start reading another book . Ideally, at this moment. You should keep reading, but you can read whatever you want .
If the second book is boring, drop that too. There is no limit to how much you can throw in a row. You will never run out of books. Your local library alone has more free books than you could read in your entire life.
I recently read a collection of Kafka’s short stories – well, most of them. The stories are ordered chronologically, so at first I worked my way through minor stories that are not asked to be read even by the illuminated majors. When a friend asked me what I was reading, I got endless anxiety that I didn’t feel “smart enough” for Kafka. He gently asked the obvious question: Why not just get good?
I did so, and it was fantastic and my reading pace increased as I only read the stories that interested me. I haven’t read all of Kafka’s stories, but I’ve read all that matter, and I needed to get to The Wizard of Earthsea much earlier. Good book!