Fallen and Flawed

How to Abandon a Book

Americans are ferociously pragmatic. We nurture an appetite for quick and easy.

For practical. Effective. Profitable.

We love racy articles on how to retire early. How to cram for a test. How to shave a pound off our tummy.

And we want these articles to hammer home the point in 5, 10 or 15 easy steps.

Don’t make me think. At least not too hard. That’s the prevailing MO.

Naturally, this pragmatism MUST be avoided when it comes to cherishing a spouse, attending a cocktail party, raising children or sharing the gospel.

But I do strongly believe some things are in lock-step with expediency. Like reading books.

The Bookworm and His Perennial Pain

Why this near-demonic urgency? If you’re like me, you have a stack of unread books on your desk. On your shelf. In your car. And…

A list of books you’d like to knock out by years end. To make matters worse, every single day you hear about one more book you want to read.

What is a bookworm to do? My answer: Be ferociously pragmatic.

What Ferociously Pragmatic Looks Like

Perhaps this means you have to occasionally barrel through a 291 page book in two hours. Or clear a Saturday to motor through three books by John Piper, D. A. Carson or Mark Dever.

Take your pick.

But whatever is on your reading list one thing is clear: You must have a purpose. You must know what you are doing. And you must know when to quit a book when it’s lost it’s capacity to satisfy you.

In other words, you must know when to abandon it.

The Little Secret to Abandoning Books

You probably didn’t know this, but there’s an instinct to abandoning a book. Sort of like foraging for food. Except you are foraging for information. You are following a scent. An information scent.

And if while reading a book you lose that scent, you should stop and move onto something else.

For me, 50 pages is the limit at which I will endure a book that’s lost it’s scent before I abandon it. Take Francis Schaeffer’s book of sermons No Little People for example.

This was the fourth book by Schaeffer I’d read in a row. And just 35 pages in I decided it wasn’t appropriate for the task at hand…namely building a profile of Schaeffer and his theology.

I found How Then Should We Live and A Christian Manifesto to have a stronger scent all the way to the end.

Little People, on the other hand, is perfect for pulling off the shelf, sitting in a chair and reading one sermon. Then going back to work.

I found this to be true of Schaeffer’s letters. Some letters had that scent. Others didn’t.

The Risk I’m Willing to Take

Here’s a surprising fact: In one night I read scanned 200 pages of The Shack long after it lost the scent I was after, which was nothing more than a marginal grasp of it’s content.

This brings me to my next point.

What if the LAST 50 pages of a book are magic? Well, that’s a risk I’m willing to take. However, if I hear enough people endorsing the last 50 pages of a book, I’ll go back and read those 50. Maybe.

Bottom line [by the way, the phrase "bottom line" is quintessential language of a pragmatist]: Know when to stop reading a book that is bad. Whether “bad” means the writer is second rate or “bad” means the book isn’t giving you want you need.

Life is short to waste on bad books. And that’s my prevailing reading MO.

Your Turn

Are you a purposeful reader? Do you have a reading plan? How long before you abandon a book? Or do you feel guilty not finishing books you’ve started?

Love to hear your thoughts. Brutal and all.

Tags: Books, Information, Reading, Scent