When is a book worth reading from start to finish?

I decided to rework this old essay from my original 52 books blog and re-post it, because this subject seems to be on people’s minds right now, at least considering how many of the book bloggers whose blogs I regularly visit have written about it in the last couple of months.

Everyone has different criteria for deciding if a book is worth finishing.
Some will read any book to the end, slogging through piles of tripe or suffering endless boredom just so they can say they have read it. Several people I know of did this with The DaVinci Code and/or The Name of the Rose. (Please note that I am not belittling either book. It just so happens that many people think the former is tripe and the latter is boring).
Others will give it a couple of chapters (or 50 pages or so in the case of “chapterless” books like those of Terry Pratchett) before deciding.
Still others will read the reviews, read the blurb, skim the book and read the ending, and then decide they’re not interested.
Each method has its merits.

As for myself, I have occasionally finished badly written books because the story or concept was interesting in spite of the bad writing, or there was something I just had to find out (usually the resolution, but sometimes some small detail). More often, I will just stop reading.

If a writer's style annoys me, I stop reading if it continues to annoy after I have read about 20-25% of the pages. This means about 50 pages of an average length novel. One example is Elizabeth Peters. I started reading one of her Amelia Peabody mysteries and found the style very annoying, so I stopped reading. However, I tried again and loved both of the books in the series that I have read so far.

If a book is dull but well written, I give it about 100 pages, because some stories start very slowly, especially long novels that need to explain a lot of background before the actual story starts. If it has not picked up by then, I stop reading (unless the book was recommended by a reliable reader, in which case I may read another 100 pages). This happens mostly with long novels and non-fiction, especially travel books.

Sometimes I come across books that tell a good story and are, for the most part, well written, but there is something missing, some spark or soul that would make an average book into a good one and a great one into a masterpiece. Those I usually finish. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd and The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde are good examples.

Sometimes books are spoiled for me by other books. Those I put aside to read at a later time when I have forgotten the book that did the spoiling. I stopped reading Gail Anderson-Dargatz's book The Cure for Death by Lightning because I had recently read The Secret Life of Bees, had not liked it much, and found too many similarities in the first chapter of Cure (both are about girls from dysfunctional families). I am assured by people who have read both that Cure... is far superior to Bees..., but I need to distance myself before I can enjoy it.

I am always ready to give authors whose books I have not liked in the past a second chance, and have usually not regretted it. Even the best of writers sometimes write bad books.

Book 7: Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński (reading notes)

-This reads like fiction - prose more beautiful than one has come to expect from non-fiction and many of the chapters are structured like fiction stories. There is little continuity between most of the chapters, although some of the narratives or stories spread over more than one chapter. This is therefore more a collection of short narratives than a cohesive entirety. You could pick it up and read the chapters at random and still get a good sense of what is going on. -Here is an author who is not trying to find himself, recover from a broken heart, set a record, visit 30 countries in 3 weeks or build a perfectly enviable home in a perfectly enviable location, which is a rarity within travel literature, but of course Kapuściński was in Africa to work, and not to travel for spiritual, mental or entertainment purposes (he was the Polish Press Agency's Africa correspondent for nearly 30 years). -I have no way of knowing how well Kapuściński knew Africa - I have never been there...

Bibliophile discusses Van Dine’s rules for writing detective stories

Writers have been putting down advice for wannabe writers for centuries, about everything from how to captivate readers to how to build a story and write believable characters to getting published. The mystery genre has had its fair share, and one of the best known advisory essays is mystery writer’s S.S. Van Dine’s 1928 piece “Twenty rules for writing detective stories.” I mentioned in one of my reviews that I might write about these rules. Well, I finally gave myself the time to do it. First comes the rule (condensed), then what I think about it. Here are the Rules as Van Dine wrote them . (Incidentally, check out the rest of this excellent mystery reader’s resource: Gaslight ) The rules are meant to apply to whodunnit amateur detective fiction, but the main ones can be applied to police and P.I. fiction as well. I will discuss them mostly in this context, but will also mention genres where the rules don’t apply and authors who have successfully and unsuccessfully broken the rules. 1...

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove...

Reading in Reykjavík

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