Quote:
Originally Posted by Yapyap
I have in the last couple of years dropped a few books without finishing them, but my problem is that I remember, vividly, several books from when I was young that took forever to get going - books I even put aside for some time and restarted later, more than once - that turned out to be very much worth the effort in the end...
One thing I've got a lot better about with the arrival of ebooks is that I feel no compunction at all to finish a series I've started. If the first book is meh (and I haven't bought the next books yet), I have no qualms about dropping the series. It's trickier if I've bought several books (if the blurbs sound potentially right my kind of thing, and there's been a good sale), because that sense of "shouldn't let the money go to waste" is another issue I still need to work on.
|
I learned fairly early from playing poker that the sense of "shouldn't let the money go to waste" simply results in losing more good money than you already have. Or, in this context, wasting good time in addition to money.
As far as books that start slow but are worth the effort, I find many classics to be that way. Reading them requires a very different attitude, one I find less suited for ebooks. For me reading many (most?) classics involves reading a few paragraphs then stopping to think about what I've just read. In the end I enjoy Charles Dickens but he's not something I'll read when I'm tired, he'd just put me to sleep. There's reading for relaxation (for me that means something light, no concentration required-I could almost read those books by skimming) and then there's reading for enjoyment (which takes concentration, either to understand what I've read or in some cases to simply speculate further on it, e.g. "would people really act that way?"). Classics I mostly read for enjoyment.
@Dr Drib, I probably shouldn't have mentioned series as 'long books' but I thought it was relevant to the problem I was describing. I have seen some series where the author has really written just one long book but they are more the exception than the rule. In the same sense there are some series where the author has really written nothing more than multiple versions of the same book-but again they're more the exception than the rule. Most authors do make an effort that each book in a series will 'stand on its own' and those I wouldn't consider a 'long book'.