Don’t Force Yourself To Finish Books You’re Not Enjoying

When I was a kid, I was a picky eater. When I ate my Kid’s Cuisine® child TV dinners, I always ate the brownie section out of the tray before eating the main meals.

My parents, fed up with the fact that the only thing I wanted to eat was the chicken nuggets and brownies from a TV dinner, told me one night I wasn’t allowed to get up from the table until I ate the (very small) portion of peas as well.

Instead of eating the peas, I threw an incredible fit. I pouted, I cried, I screamed. Finally, after several hours, I choked down those peas like they were cow bones and ran upstairs to cry as if eating peas was a traumatic experience.

Was I a little tyrant of a child? Possibly. The moral of this story, though, is not that I was a poorly behaved child, but that it was well into adulthood before I was willing to eat anything green. A couple of episodes of being forced to eat vegetables I did not want to eat early in my life made me see vegetables as a punishment, something one had to endure.

As soon as I became old enough to pick what I ate for myself, I stopped eating them altogether. I had to get old enough to worry about vitamins and coronary heart disease before I thought that maybe it might be good for me to eat a vegetable.

I think the public school system teaches many people a similar attitude about reading. Like eating vegetables, most children enjoy reading — until the school system forces them to read books they don’t want to read. Reading is transformed from a source of pleasure to a source of punishment, and students learn to hate reading. Once they become adults, they give it up altogether.

Nobody can force themselves to read 75 books a year. If you want to read 75 books a year, you’re going to have to enjoy it. And you’re only going to enjoy it if you’re not forcing yourself through it. So if you start reading a book only to find you’re not enjoying it anymore, don’t force yourself to finish it. Find something else you’ll enjoy more, and read that instead.