The Fifty Page Rule

Giving up on a book is a skill, not a failure, and most readers learn it far too late.

The books you did not finish are not a debt.

Somewhere in school most of us learned that an abandoned book is a small moral failure, and a lot of adults still carry it. The result is a bedside pile that functions as a reproach, and months of not reading anything because the thing on top is a novel you stopped enjoying in February.

The fix is a rule you apply without negotiating.

Nancy Pearl's version

The librarian Nancy Pearl proposed fifty pages, and after fifty you subtract your age from one hundred and read that many instead. At forty you owe a book sixty pages. At seventy you owe it thirty. The joke is also the argument: time gets scarcer and the standard should rise with it.

It works because it removes the decision from the moment you are least able to make it.

What it is not

It is not a judgement on the book. Plenty of things I put down at fifty pages I have picked up years later and loved, because the problem was the week rather than the writing.

Mark it, shelve it, move on. Nobody is keeping score.

The one exception

If three people whose taste you trust have all told you it takes a hundred pages to start, give it a hundred. That is a real category and it contains some of the best novels there are. But three people, and people you actually trust.