Compelled to finish?

Woven

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Do you ever feel compelled to finish reading a book regardless of whether you like it?

I'm in the middle of Anne Rivers-Siddons (a favorite author)'s "Off Season" but I just can't get into it. I've been reading it since August! I just can't bring myself to pick up another book until I've trudged through to the end. I've read every book she's written and I guess I need to be able to continue saying that. :Shrug:

Anyone else?
 

stephenf

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If, after fifty pages or so, I can't get into a book ,out it go's .All you will need to say is" I have read all of Anne Rivers-Siddons books except Off Season which was......"?Believe me, life is too short to struggle with things like that.
 

Severian

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I sometimes feel like this, if I've invested a lot of time in a book. For example, I've tried several times to finish The High House, just to see how it ends, but I never quite get there.
 
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If I take too long to get through a book (the length of time qualifing as 'too long' depends on my mood) I lose the thread of the story and dump it for a while but more often than not I go back to it within a few weeks. I'm stubborn like that.
 

Grrarrgh

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Not anymore. I used to force myself to finish every book I started, but anymore, if I'm not into it I stop. There are way too many books out there I want to read for me to be wasting time with ones that I'm not enjoying.
 

Severian

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I am now reading The High House, AGAIN, and I swear I'm gonna finish it this time.
 

KikiteNeko

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No, I've been known to abandon books I don't like. In one particular case the book was so awful that I actually returned it. But that's not typical. Typically I dislike it, but will keep it around and thumb through random pages of it when I have writer's block. It's so weird how that helps.
 

Satori1977

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Quite a few times I get bored with a book, and have to put it down. Or I am suddenly not in the mood for that genre, and stash it away for later. I have a few of those books. And I have every intention of going back. There has only been one book I stopped reading and refused to finish. Can't remember the name of it. It was a werewolf book, and I usually love them. But this one was so stupid, I couldn't get past it. Ended up donated the book to my library in town.
 

RunawayScribe

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Most of the time, I finish the books I start. It has to be really, really atrocious and migraine-inducing to get me to ditch it altogether. I'd say it happens one in maybe twenty-five or thirty reads for me. Oftentimes I find a book I may not love will start to snag me farther down the line, or have some sort of self-redemption in its denouement and overall conclusion. I like to ingest a work as a whole before I form an opinion. There have been a few exceptions, of course, but that's how I generally work.
 

Severian

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I finished the High House. Worth it I suppose, in the end.
 

Manderley

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I have little tolerance if I don't think the book is worth it, but sometimes I hit a book that is hard to get through and yet compels me to finish it. The Brothers Karamazov was one (took me 3 months) and The Woman in White, which I just finished a few days ago after having struggled with it since September, is another.
 

kellysarah

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Most of the time, I have to finish a book I start, but there have been a few exceptions. The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova. The third book of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I am currently struggling to finish Skin Priviledge by Karin Slaughter; after reading it, I now know what my tutor meant when he said "explain things by doing, not by saying".
 

SirOtter

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I read three pages of Dan Brown's Angels & Demons before throwing it across the room. Those three pages had so many dashes and ellipses, it felt like I was trying to read Morse Code. It wouldn't break my heart if every copy of that book were loaded on a ship and sailed into the Persian Gulf to be meekly surrendered to Somalian pirates.
 

Stlight

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Generally, if I don’t care for a book, I put it away, recycle it whatever. (This includes Hugo and the great whale book.) There are more books than I will have time to read, why read one that doesn’t work for me?

The exception was A. Rice’s Feast of All Saints. Loved the vampire series, but that one, no, threw it away, literally a couple of times. A couple of times you ask, how is that possible? Because something about the book made me get it out of the trash. I could not stop reading it, though I hated it. I was shocked to discover who the hero was at the end. I thought he was a minor villain or merely a secondary character. It creeped me out that I couldn’t not finish that book. It still does.