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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And AI will write them
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While spawning hundreds of spy agents with cameras to fly around you and see if your reaction is within guidelines, and if it can extract any behavior worth learning, that will make it look even more human
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That is terrifying. Imagine if that happens where our reactions are monitored. No different from how our government functions today.
AI language is easily detectable, it is uniform but what if it is able to individualize those as well.
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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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