MargenGiving up on a book is not failing as a reader: it is respecting the time you have left. Life is short and the shelves are very, very long.
We still drag around the schoolroom idea that leaving a book half-read is a small disgrace, and so we turn the bedside table into a courtroom: that half-started book eyeing us every night with reproach.
But a book is not a contract. It is a conversation — and from conversations going nowhere one may politely get up and leave.
Besides, abandoning is not always goodbye: sometimes it is a «not yet». There are books that reject us at twenty and wait patiently until we are forty, when we finally become the person they were written for. Put it down without guilt. If it is yours, it will find you again.