How far will you read in a book before you quit?

I’m not someone who believes it necessary to finish every book I start reading. I’ve found it croggling to read comments by folks who feel that they “owe it to the author” to finish a book. I find that idea ridiculous. I mean of course the author won’t ever know but you owe authors what – your best shot, right? If you believe you owe authors anything, and even there, I’m not sure. You owe it to any writer not to rip them off – don’t buy books without covers, whatever, but owe?

Even as a reviewer, I don’t know that I “owe” anything. But here’s the thing. Yesterday I picked up a book and started reading it and found a lot to like. Kept reading. Read quite a bit of it. By last night, I had the book HALF read. Then I stopped and said “well, I guess not”. I don’t know that I’ve ever gotten halfway – that’s like 150 pages down – through a book and then quit. That’s like leaving a moving halfway or more through. Which I’ve done twice in my life – wouilda done 3 times if I’d had a way to get home that third time*. Only it’s more so since I invest more in reading a book than I do in watching a movie.

There was a lot to like in this book – interesting protagonist and interesting bunch of characters, even though I felt like, after a while, we were going over the same ground. But the truth is it was getting too violent; there were MORE people dying and the bodies were piling up and it was clear that some of the murders were really gross and getting grosser and nothing would keep me wanting to read that. It was also ending up a little too, I dunno, too many people weren’t the parents of children they were raising and I was losing track of who was father of whom. Or something.

So I quit. Despite a promising beginning. Beginning hell -- a promising first 100-plus pages.

Isn’t that weird? I stayed that long and then slam, that was it. Somehow I sensed the bad was beginning to outweigh the good or something. Would you have finished? Have you ever quit a book that far in?

(*For the record, “Melvin and Howard”, “Shoot the Moon” and the third would have been “Everything you ever wanted to know about Sex”)