We’ve all been there. You start reading a book that looks really promising, but for whatever reason, it’s just not clicking. The plot isn’t moving fast enough. The characters are ungodly irritating. The prose is seriously off-putting. But you owe it to the author to finish it, right? That’s what I always thought, at least. It was my own personal policy that I had to finish every single book that I started, because you never know if it will get better by the end; it could have some redeeming quality that made you pick it up in the first place.
Recently, I’ve come to the realization that life is too short to continue reading books that you’re not interested in. For example, I had been hearing a lot about The Magicians by Lev Grossman recently, and everyone said that any Harry Potter fan would fall in love with it, that it was a new Harry Potter for an older generation. So I started it. I kept an open mind, wanting to love it, but having a really hard time getting into the story.
But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t get into it. So much so that I kind of felt like this while reading it:
