On quitting books & creating a quit list
Quitting a book is hard. I’ve never been good at it. But I’ve noticed a pattern of misattribution that comes up every now and then and it goes like this: I stall out on making progress in a book and chalk it up to some excuse like being busy at work, having a crowded personal calendar or not being able to "find" time to read for some reason. Before I know it I have been reading (supposedly) whatever book for weeks. Then I happen to pick up a different book and it takes a few days to get through. What happened to being busy at work, too tired and all that?
My conclusion is this: good books read themselves. When you’re reading a good book you don’t struggle to find the time to read it. You decide to not watch another episode of some show so you can get some reading in before bed. You take the time in the morning to enjoy some coffee and read for 15 or 30 minutes before starting work. You see that ten minute wait at the dentist's office as a chance to read a few more pages.
In short, when reading a good book you don't have to find the time for it. There's a sense that any available time is readily visible, or even highlighted in your awareness, and used accordingly. A close friend recently asked about when I typically find time to read in my day and my almost reflexive answer was "it depends on the book." That's about as honest an answer I can give.
Is this the right book for me? Is this the right book for you?
Of course, what makes a “good” book is a personal, subjective assessment. That is, in fact, part of the underlying issue here: through recommendations by individuals or society (i.e. commercial marketing, promotion, awards, etc.), certain books are deemed “the best” or fall into a category of “should be read.” Recommendations will be made, from your friends to you, you to them, here to there, but at the at the end of the day every individual has different literary, intellectual and entertainment resonant frequencies, so to speak, and what resonates for any one person may not resonate for another.
The first step in quitting a book is picking the wrong one to read, which suggests that at the deepest level this topic is about recommendations and managing your choices. If a perfect1 recommendation process existed the question of finding the next best book to read would not, but alas, here we are. In an effort to better assess my choices and defend my time against not-good2 books I thought a “quit list” of books I have quit reading might help. The quit list provides a “shelf” to mentally offload books to for reconsideration at a later date, and its existence alone serves as a reminder that quitting a book is a fine and good thing to do. And if you like making lists the quit list might even incentivize you to quit with a little more pizazz3.
Starting and maintaining a quit list
Starting a quit list should be relatively straight forward: log the books you quit in some reliable way.
Maintaining the quit list is perhaps the harder part, as that requires that you actually quit reading books. If you’re an expert book quitter this probably isn’t for you (and you're probably not reading this sentence).
For the rest of us hopeful quitters, it may be possible to develop a more objective yet personal rubric to size up the quality of a book, but my own path will be that of honest self assessment via the following question: am I making time to read this book? If I go more than a week without having cut out time for a book, that’s not a good sign. Two weeks means it’s probably going to the quit list. But, ultimately, your assessment conditions will be up to you.
As far as what is seen and what is not, the quit list is a cultural blind spot. Relationships and businesses are built on top of to-read, want-to-read, and have-read lists, but I am not aware of any have-quit lists.
If you’re curious, feel free to take a peak at my newborn quit list. If you like the idea and decide to create a quit list of your own, I’d love to know!
I really do mean perfect, like AGI, theory of everything, never going to exist level perfect.↩
Orwellion language used here as I would really never call a book "bad." What I mean is the book in whomever's assessment is something other than "good" as discussed here. Doublespeak has some non-authoritarian value, sometimes.↩
The point is to quit more to read more, but it is personally amusing to imagine endorsing the quitting of reading books. Just to be clear, I'm in the John Waters camp.↩