When Is an Appropriate Time to Give Up on a Book?

So, I've been reading 'Infinite Jest' (again)...

November 5, 2015 was a big mail day for me. I was always very excited to make the package pickup at SUNY New Paltz to get whatever t-shirt or book or whatever bullshit I’d ordered to immediately wear, read, or display somehow. That day, a shipment of three books came to my dorm, and it took me very long to read all of them. I only know the day, because I’d posted them on Instagram. I’ve stopped posting books to my main feed before reading them out of fear that I won’t finish them.

The first two books were by Joan Didion: Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The Year of Magical Thinking. As an author with countless books and rabid fans, those are two that easily land within her top 5 most popular books, if not topping the list (save for maybe The White Album). I tried to read Slouching Towards Bethlehem first of the three books. I wasn’t crazy about the writing style at the time. It wasn’t until I revisited the book in 2020 that I fully appreciated how good of a read it was. Didion’s journalism has stood the test of time, and it’s continued to resonate with readers to this day.

I’d picked up the book because John Darnielle from the Mountain Goats name-checked Didion in the band’s cover of “Boxcar” by Jawbreaker. I was disappointed when my first foray into her work didn’t connect. A few months later, I picked up The Year of Magical Thinking, and I adored it. The issues that I ran into with Slouching Towards Bethlehem weren’t as present in the memoir, and I read it quickly and was incredibly moved. I’ve considered giving copies to people when they’re going through loss and grieving. I haven’t because most of my friends don’t read as much as I do, but I think about it whenever someone loses a parent or relative.

The third book was the big daddy. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. A book that’s become as much meme as it is a pivotal piece of 20^th Century literature. I don’t think that the meme-ification of Infinite Jest had begun while I was in college, but the aesthetic of it certainly had. It was incredibly common to see the book show up in tumblr collages of classic books. It always felt prominently displayed at bookstores. While in college, I was entrenched in the classics and fell in love with Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and more, but I felt like I could make the jump into more modern literature through David Foster Wallace.

I forget how long it took me to give Infinite Jest a shot after Slouching Towards Bethlehem, but it was very short-lived. I only got about 50 pages in before abandoning it. I remembered this earlier this week, because when I reached that point in the book, I saw that I had dog-eared page 50. There is a new chapter/section/page break there, and I can guarantee that I wasn’t reading closely and wasn’t fully digesting what I was reading.

Even reading now, I’m sure that there are moments that I’m missing and not gaining a full understanding of. I’m enjoying the reading much more now, and I’m getting understanding, but I completely get why I gave up when I did: I was a dumb person in my early 20s.

I don’t think I’m much smarter now than I was at 22. I know that I am, but I don’t feel like my brain has grown to a size where a DFW-inspired bandana has magically appeared on my forehead. I still feel just as vulnerable and silly as I did at 22, but I read at a greater clip than the average college student, even though I was an English major¹.

As I’ve gotten older, I also try to not waste time with books that I don’t want to read². Even though I really wanted to read Infinite Jest as a younger man, I also had no clue what I was getting into. I figured it was going to be a breeze, just long. I was studying literature. I was thinking critically about things, and I should be able to read one of the more interesting books of the latter 20^th Century.

Even now, as I’m dedicated to this slow-moving journey through Infinite Jest, I’m feeling confident, but I’m occasionally struggling. For one, I do most of my reading on the subway, and Infinite Jest is far too big to carry with me. I also don’t want to be the jackass with the 1,000-page book stacked up beside him. So I read it at home. Usually before work, but sometimes I finish my morning run too late to will myself to knock out a few pages before I need to sign on.

While I do think that I’ll get through Infinite Jest, coming across the old page where my bookmark was left has got me thinking about when are the appropriate times to stop reading a book.

Here are my rules on when you can stop a book:

·      If you don’t like it and it’s slow, you can stop. Unless you’re in a book club or still in school, I don’t think you should force yourself through a book you don’t like. My general rule of thumb is to try to go 50 pages before quitting, but if you bought the book, and  you hate it, you can just call it^3..

·      If someone gifted you the book, you owe them the old college try. The person thinks that you would’ve enjoyed whatever they gave you, and if you respect that person’s tastes, you should get at least 50-60 pages before folding.

·      If you know the author personally, you do kind of need to finish the book. You can have a friend give you the rundown and try to lie convincingly with your Sparknotes, but it’s not going to be easy. Plus, do you really want to carry that lie for the rest of your life?

·      If the book is by James Patterson, you can stop before you even take it off the shelf, check it out from the library, bring it to the cashier, put it in your cart, or look at the back cover.

·      If the book is a classic, you need to either come up with a really convincing argument as why people who think it’s a classic are wrong, or you just need to accept that  you weren’t a good enough reader to finish it. That might be snobby, but it’s also correct.

·      If you’ve spent as much time watching videos, reading discussions, and talking about the book with other people as it would take you to read it, it’s time for you to actually read whatever book you’re pretending to be an expert in. You’re not the older son from The Squid and the Whale.

Ultimately, this all served as a distraction from reading Infinite Jest. Maybe I’ll give some musings along the way, but I probably won’t check back in until I’m finished. When I do reach the end, I am looking forward to re-watching The End of the Tour, and maybe reading the book that it was based on also, but that’s just something that I’m holding out for myself. If I do give up again, you won’t hear it from me.

1. Anyone with a Bachelor’s degree in English will tell you that no one does all of the reading. In fact, you’re lucky if you do any of the reading. Getting an English degree will merely teach you how to bullshit and act like you’ve read all of the books that you’ve been assigned. Even though you might try to go back and get a greater understanding of those books at an older age, you’re not going to feel as confident as you did as when you listened to an adjunct lecture about something that you skimmed the Sparknotes page for. I took a survey course on James Joyce’s works, and I still act like I know Ulysses. I’ve barely read the book. I’m not even sure I’ve read one chapter of it. I may still go back at some point, but I’m not going to ever speak as confidently about this book as I did when I was hammered at a bar, after a day of hearing my professor lecture. I also feel confident that if every college syllabus I ever had was placed in front of me, I could tell you what I did and didn’t read.

2. Don’t want to read is the key part of this phrase. I don’t mean books that I don’t like. I’ve read a lot of books that I don’t like. Sometimes, it’s out of stubbornness and readability (see: In A Dark, Dark Wood by Ruth Ware). Other times, it’s because it’s a literary classic that I feel like I should read (see: The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner). I’ve also read a number of poetry collections that I’m less than impressed with, and even though I may not always enjoy them, they’re usually very short and easy reads, and I can always use some padding on my yearly reading lists.

3. My first girlfriend when I was a teenager hated reading, but insisted that I read all three books in The Hunger Games trilogy, before she’d read my favorite book, which at the time was Killing Yourself to Live by Chuck Klosterman^a. Besides that being a terrible deal, I’m incredibly happy that I didn’t reading Mockingjay, because as mediocre as the first book was, Catching Fire was such a let-down after she and many other people hyped it up to me. (2012 was a different time).  I can’t get back the time that I wasted on Catching Fire, but I didn’t lose any by resentfully reading Mockingjay.

a. That’s still my second favorite book of all-time and favorite non-fiction.