I give up

The art of not reading a book

Come and join us for an event

• 10th March, Oliver Bullough, Everybody Loves Our Dollars The bestselling author of Moneyland talks all things money laundering

• 13th March, Poetry Open Mic

• 17th March, John Lanchester, Look What You Made Me Do His latest novel, a black comedy of entitlement and resentment

• 18th March, Simon Kuper, World Cup Fever The FT journalist and football addict in conversation with James Restall, Head of Sport at The Times

• 24th March, Dominic Gregory, Lifeboat at the End of the World A volunteer’s account at ground zero of the Channel small boats crisis

• 14th April, Lizzy Stewart, The Wreck The Goldsmith’s illustration teacher and author/illustrator behind Alison

• SOLD OUT 15th April, Sophie Gilbert, Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned A Generation of Women Against Themselves

• 21st April, Adrian Wooldridge, Centrists of The World Unite The Bloomberg writer talks liberalism with Times columnist and ex-Economist deputy editor Emma Duncan

• 22nd April, Georgina Hayden, Medesque Fab food writer on recipes to bring the Med into our homes

• 28th April, Sebastian Mallaby, The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind and the Quest for Superintelligence Author of The Power Law on the race to design the future

• 19th May, Bryony Gordon, People Pleaser First novel by the author, journalist and mental health campaigner (whose maternity leave Tom implausibly covered!)

• Or come and meet Patrick Radden Keefe who will be signing copies of London Falling in May

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Our books of the month

Fiction Look What You Made Me Do by John Lanchester

What if the year’s top TV show was about your marriage? We lapped up this black comedy of resentment and entitlement set in middle-class London. Balham gets a mention!

Non-fiction Is This Working? by Charlie Colenutt

A brilliant compilation of interviews with 60 Britons from sex workers to bakers, teachers to couriers. What do they do all day? And are they happy? A fascinating patchwork of Britain.

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EARLIER THIS WEEK, Zoë, a new member of the Backstory team, told me she really wasn’t getting on with her current read. “Give up!” I implored her. “Move on to something more fun.”

She looked aghast. To judge from her expression, I might as well have told her that I secretly order all of our stock from Jeff Bezos.

Zoë, of course, is not alone. Many readers — most? — seem to regard not finishing a book as something to be ashamed of. Customers confess in whispers that they “failed” to finish a certain doorstopper, or tell me that they “struggled” with this or that title for weeks on end but “persevered” to the end, as if they had been trudging along The Salt Path not trudging through The Salt Path.

So what I’m about to say may well horrify you.

I ditch books all the time. Just this week, I read about 50 pages of a new novel — I won’t tell you which, or not until you buy me a glass of Backstory’s finest red — and then put it aside. I immediately started something else, and I’m enjoying it much more.

I’m not remotely sorry about this habit. If anything, I think I ought to do it more often, and sooner. And I think you should consider doing it too.

You might be thinking that I have a financial interest here. That’s true: if customers give up on something they’re not enjoying, they’re going to need something else to try. And they might be keener to get some help choosing their next read — from a friendly bookseller, for instance.

But my longer-term interest — stemming from conviction and financial calculation — is in people enjoying reading. Not in feeling that satisfaction that comes from conquering something you had feared and put off for ages, which puts reading Ulysses in the same bracket as clearing out the garden shed. But from relishing the act itself: deriving so much satisfaction, education, escape, immersion, emotion and sheer joy that you want more and more of it.

Some books are designed to be page-turners. Mysteries, for instance, or spy stories. Others are obviously not: academic titles, anthologies or dictionaries. But most books aren’t one or the other: if you’re the right person in the right mood at the right time, you’ll turn the pages. If you’re not, you won’t. You don’t need to force it.

I regularly put down books after a chapter of two. Usually, they go straight in the charity-shop pile. Sometimes I think they are terrible books. Mostly, though, I think they aren’t right for me, or at least aren’t right for me now.

Occasionally, I will pick them up a month, a year, even a decade later, and be enthralled. That doesn’t mean I was wrong the first time: for whatever reason it didn’t speak to me then, and now it does. Maybe I’m in a different mood, maybe I’ve become a different person entirely.

Equally, there are times when I have recommended to a customer a book that I loved as a teenager only to hear that they went on to struggle with it. Upon re-reading, I find I do, too: what spoke to me at 19, I might now find puerile or pretentious. Other books endure.

None of this is a problem. Or it is only so if you also insist on never skipping a song that doesn’t suit your mood that day, reading every newspaper article in full or on only eating one dish at a tapas restaurant.

By insisting on being the Magnus Magnusson of paperbacks (“I’ve started, so I’ll finish”), you deny yourself the chance to find a book that suits you better. And if you’re not enjoying your current read, you will find that the hundreds of other tasks you need to do right now instead of reading suddenly come to the forefront of your mind. You might finish a greater proportion of the books you start, then, but you will finish a smaller number of books in total.

I like Oliver Burkeman’s suggestion that we should treat a “to read” pile as a river (“a stream that flows past you, and from which you pluck a few choice items, here and there”) instead of a bucket (“which demands that you empty it”).

“After all,” he writes, “you presumably don’t feel overwhelmed by all the unread books in the British Library — and not because there aren’t an overwhelming number of them, but because it never occurred to you that it might be your job to get through them all.”

I am not arguing that we should never settle on the great book currently in our hands because there might be an even better one upstream, that there are “plenty more fish in the sea”. That way we’d never enjoy any book at all, because we’d worry there was a stunner closer to the other bank.

But we shouldn’t be afraid of plucking out a pebble, turning it over in our hands for a bit and, if we aren’t caught in the moment, gleefully throwing it back in to the river for someone else to take out later.

I’ve almost finished that second book now, the one I didn’t ditch. So tomorrow the audition starts all over again. From a teetering pile of likely candidates, one book is currently crying out to be read. Let’s see if it’s a keeper.

Happy reading,

Tom