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Some people know how to quit a book as soon as they stop liking it. But many of us feel some sort of completist pressure to stick with every book we start, even when reading for pleasure. We struggle through stuff we don’t actually like, and so we’re less likely to pick up the book and more likely to pick up our phone. We start reading less.




If you wish you could read more books, try quitting the one you’re on. If it’s not calling to you every minute that you’re away, maybe you should drop it and find a book that does. In fact, whenever a book bores you for two (or five, or ten) pages in a row, quit it. Move on. If you end up wondering what happened next, you can always come back.

The catch is, the moment you quit a book, you have to start reading another book. Ideally that very minute. You have to keep reading, but you can read whatever you want.


If the second book’s boring, you can quit it too. There’s no limit on how many you can quit in a row. You will never run out of books. Your local library alone holds more free books than you could read in your lifetime.

I recently read the collected short stories of Kafka—well, most of them. The stories are ordered chronologically, so at first I was wading through minor stories that even lit majors aren’t asked to read. When a friend asked me what I was reading, I went off on a litany of anxiety about not feeling “smart enough” for Kafka. He gently asked the obvious question: Why not just skip to the good stuff?

So I did, and it was fantastic, and my reading pace picked up as I only read the stories that engaged me. I didn’t read every Kafka story, but I read all the ones that matter, and I got to move onto A Wizard of Earthsea that much sooner. Good book!