I have a short, but sweet little post for you today.
Firstly, I want to mention that I mean "give up on books" as an individual basis. You know the feeling. You are about 50 pages into a book and are overly frustrated because it seems boring and lackluster and you have 30 books on your shelf that might bring more joy into your life. If you do decide to move on to something better, it is referred to as "DNF" or "Did not finish".
We live in a society that says to simply give up on a book if you are not feeling it, and while I almost wish this is how my brain worked (so many books and so little time), there have been too many occasions where this logic would have caused me to miss out on so many amazing stories. Not all stories are attention-holding and life-changing from start to finish, and if you choose to only read books that are then all of the power to you, but I sometimes appreciate the hard work that it takes to get to the amazing bits. Also, I read far too many books that are not incredible in its entirety, so I feel like I would spend too much time searching for those gems and not enough time reading.
The reason that I am writing this is because I just started the 3rd book in the Mistborn Trilogy by Brandon Sanderson. It is a well-beloved series and author and has been recommended to me more times than I can fathom, so I thought I owed it to myself to give it a go (even though fantasy is definitely not my genre of choice anymore). The first book took me almost 2 months to finish. I found myself doing things to get out of reading it and flew through 8 or 9 other books in the process. I also did not find the overall product anything to write home about, but the rave reviews pushed me to pick up the second book. I started in April 2018 and finished it last night. That is 3/4ths of a year that it took me to read this book, people! The first 2/3rds were incredibly laborious and (dare I say) boring. But, and this is where this blog comes in, I absolutely FLEW through the last 1/3rd. I felt myself gasping aloud and gaping at my empty lounge and when I finished it my first thought was "I NEED TO PICK UP THE NEXT BOOK IMMEDIATELY".
I have absolutely no clue whether or not the third book in the series will be worth it (I will let you know!), but I just keep thinking to myself- "What if I had stopped reading and never got to experience those amazing 250 pages of bliss?". This has happened to me multiple time! I can think of 8 or 9 books off the top of my head where I had considered stopping a series or a book, but persisted and was rewarded in the end.
That being said, I also do A LOT of research into my books before I pick them up to see if they are something that I think I would like. I was just telling someone that I couldn't remember the last time that I just wandered into a book store and picked up the first book I liked the look of! Perhaps if that is something you do regularly, you need to develop a more cut-throat mentality since it is less likely to be a book that you think you would really enjoy at the end.
Do you quit reading and pick up another book or see all of your books 'till the end?