Why Do We Put Down Books?

Peter Wild explores the question after looking at a new Goodreads infographic:

[O]bviously, there are those that are “difficult”. Not for nothing is Ulysses amongst the most abandoned classics. I’m sure there’s room on that shelf for Thomas Pynchon’s V, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Don DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star as well (although as a person who never abandons a book, I take an obscure satisfaction in having finished all of them). But actually there’s no shame in saying that a book is too difficult. Not only is it an acknowledgement of your own limitations, which in itself is a kind of wisdom, it’s also a kind of challenge, an admission that a book is too much for me now but might not be in the future (it took me three swings at V before I finally made it all the way through).

Challenging reads are probably a small niche within the abandoned bookstacks . I’d hazard a guess that the main reason people abandon books is because life is too short.

Again, those good people over at Goodreads have conducted a straw poll and the chart is currently topped b JK Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy and EL James’s Fifty Shades of Grey. Whilst this demonstrates that the kind of readers who like to take part in straw polls have short memories, it also indicates quite well what kinds of books are most frequently cast aside: the books that disappoint (Rowling’s earnest novel for adults is a little too far from the ice cream and ginger beer of Harry Potter for most readers) and those that you read simply because everyone else is reading them (I haven’t succumbed to Fifty Shades of Grey myself but I’ve had enough people tell me it’s as bad as Twilight to know I’m not missing anything).