Quit Again!

This week I am going back in the archives to bring you one of the posts I get the most comments on – QUITTING. If you were around for the “original airing” of this post, I would love to hear if your stance on quitting has changed in the last couple years. If this is new for you – let’s hear your words about quitting.

 


 

I often have people talk to me about abandoning books. I have no shame in my DNF (Did Not Finish) game. I am not afraid to abandon a book and encourage you to look at why you would not stop doing something that was not lighting you up. Life is too short to read books that do not put wind in your sails just as life is too short to stay friends with energy vampires and life is too short to wear jeans that are too tight.

Quit Abandoned Books

It is not that it is a bad book. Despite what James Joyce said, I do not believe there are bad books. I can appreciate how hard an author works on a book and to call it bad just seems like a big kick in the pants. I hope anyone reading what I write will give me grace when something I write doesn’t land with them.

It is hard to abandon books that critics and the public RAVE about. Sometimes I think it is the chapter of life I am in vs. where the author was when he was writing. More often I just decide I am different than everyone else and move onto the next book in the stack.

Let’s talk numbers though. I do believe in skipping the rating if I have not finished a book. I would not want to bring down the average rating for an author if I have not finished a book. I have a specific shelf in Goodreads for DNF books so that I can make sure they do not count in my annual book statistics.

Tell me all your thoughts and opinions about DNFing!

By |2021-08-03T07:58:36-04:00August 3rd, 2021|Habit Change|0 Comments

A Monk Swimming – Malachy McCourt

Rating: DNF around p 60/300

Cliff Notes: Too scattered for me to get traction with the author’s voice

Full Summary: I think part of the problem I was having was I expected Frank McCourt kind of novel. This memoir was more of a series of humorous anecdotes. I would have liked to shoot the shit with Malachy, but could not really engage in his stories. He would have been a great blogger I bet.

A Monk Swimming Malachy McCourt
By |2019-12-12T19:30:27-05:00June 18th, 2019|Mental Well-being|0 Comments

More on Book Abandonment

Friends, you will remember that we have discussed the fact that I am a quitter. I have no shame in quitting a book that is not resonating with me. This is not to say that I want to ride unicorns and poop rainbows about all of the books I read. I may have a visceral reaction to a character or a theme or plot device – I am looking at you, We Need to Talk About Kevin. But sometimes that is the author’s purpose – to have that visceral response. To FEEL something. To REACT to something. Not to just passively read words and move onto the next.

I have recently starting reading a book by SARK, an author with the tag line: Creating a Beacon of Hope in a Chaotic World. And I believe books are that as well! They are our beacon of hope, but they do not all need to be finished. Some need to be beautiful and sit on our shelves and make us happy. Some may need to be finished, but not by us. Some need to be finished by us in another chapter of our lives – the book just got to us too soon.

I want to declare that books do not need to be finished to be of value. You can dip into this book, gobble it up, do all the things it suggests, explore every resource, game, and invention, or just lie quietly, smiling at the cover.

It will smile back.

S.A.R.K.
By |2019-12-12T19:06:02-05:00June 12th, 2019|Mental Well-being|0 Comments

Casual Vacancy – J.K. Rowling

Rating: n/a

Cliff Notes: It was too dense to wade through with people I hated.

Full Summary: DNF’d after 235 pages (out of 500). I hated all these characters and there were too many to hate them all. Then piling on local politics — BARF. At least with Harry Potter I had Minerva and Hermione to keep me going – I remember being overwhelmed with the amount of people and magical names with HP the first time I read it too.

I wonder how much of my disappointment with Casual Vacancy is that I loved Harry Potter so much. There was just too much hype going into it, maybe? Maybe it just need a basilisk to goose some of these idiots into doing something interesting.

JK Rowling Casual Vacancy

By |2019-12-12T19:33:04-05:00June 1st, 2019|Mental Well-being|0 Comments

Quitters DO Win Sometimes!

I often have people talk to me about abandoning books. I have no shame in my DNF (Did Not Finish) game. I am not afraid to abandon a book and encourage you to look at why you would not stop doing something that was not lighting you up. Life is too short to read books that do not put wind in your sails just as life is too short to stay friends with energy vampires and life is too short to wear jeans that are too tight.

Quit Abandoned Books

It is not that it is a bad book. Despite what James Joyce said, I do not believe there are bad books. I can appreciate how hard an author works on a book and to call it bad just seems like a big kick in the pants. I hope anyone reading what I write will give me grace when something I write doesn’t land with them.

It is hard to abandon books that critics and the public RAVE about. Sometimes I think it is the chapter of life I am in vs. where the author was when he was writing. More often I just decide I am different than everyone else and move onto the next book in the stack.

Let’s talk numbers though. I do believe in skipping the rating if I have not finished a book. I would not want to bring down the average rating for an author if I have not finished a book. I have a specific shelf in Goodreads for DNF books so that I can make sure they do not count in my annual book statistics.

Tell me all your thoughts and opinions about DNFing!

By |2019-12-12T19:10:38-05:00May 21st, 2019|Mental Well-being|0 Comments
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