I have this rule that if a book doesn’t go well, I just stop reading and move it to the donations pile. This rule prevents 1* reviews and makes my life a tiny bit more positive. I also don’t suffer through bad fits for too long, as I clearly don’t like what I’m seeing. This rule got me from 30~ish books read/year to over 50.
However, there are at least two ways to get to the end of a bad book without realizing it’s that awful.
- It can be a good book with a terrible ending. Like, it looks like a great thriller or crime, and they kill the main character, the main supporting character, or it reveal the main character as the killer. John Grisham does that often. Sooley is a good example.
- It can be a passable book with hints it might contain AI slop or really poor ghost writer work. I complete it and then the memories about it sit less and less well, and what was once a 3* book turns into a 1* slop in the weeks after. The most recent works by Lee Child and Harlan Coben fall into that category. I recently had a thriller where the main character was misgendered in the text and a very suspicious stats book, with issues hinting AI use.
AI doesn’t produce readable books for me, also doesn’t produce readable chapters, paragraphs or blog posts. It can turn a perfectly fine paragraph into a grammatically correct and unreadable slop. I wouldn’t even be able to point my finger at what’s wrong with it.
Veselin.blog 
We are in the era of AI written books. What’ll happen to humankind.
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We’ll write more 1984 books about a future where nobody owns anything, nobody works, everything is constantly watched, and nothing ever changes.
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I’m glad to know I’m not the only person frustrated by the endings of a lot of Grisham’s books.
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I call these activist books. Their purpose is to shock you and educate you on a subject. With Sooley it’s drugs but it’s usually some bigger injustice.
Nikki French have started leaning that direction as well. That’s a shame because Grisham and French are very, very good authors.
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The donation-pile rule is a good one, and going from 30 to 50 books a year is proof it works — sunk cost gets a lot of people stuck at page 60. Your first category is the cruel one though: you can’t abandon a book that’s good until the last twenty pages, so the ending gets you regardless.
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Yes, that’s the most Claude summary I’ve recently read 🙂 Is there even a single letter you wrote on your own?
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I see it the other way round, I learn a lot from books I don’t like. I used just these books for teaching my literature courses. You see pretty well what doesn’t work and why.
I have enough time and so I read every book I start to the end – except non-fiction books.
Klausbernd 🙂
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Done it for school, it’s difficult. But admire your approach 🙂
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That’s such a smart rule! 😂 Life is definitely too short to force yourself through a book that just isn’t working. 📚🤍✨
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Yep, our time is here is limited 🙂
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