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It’s Ok To Not Get To The End of a Book

Not every book is worth your time

Tom Stevenson
5 min readFeb 13, 2020
Photo by Joel Muniz on Unsplash

When I was younger, I used to pride myself on getting to the end of every book that I read. I remember one time in particular.

Back in 2001, the first of three Lord of The Rings films was released. Like most children my age, I was enthralled by the films and became a huge fan, which I still am to this day.

Once I realised that the films were first written as novels, I had to read them. I didn’t care if reading the final two books would spoil the films, I just wanted to read them! Surely, they would be as entertaining as the films, right?

Well, for this reader they weren’t. I found J.R.R. Tolkein’s prose hard to read and the constant referral to characters as the son of so and so became tedious after the first hundred pages.

It was at this point into the first book that I realised I didn’t want to carry on reading. As an 11-year-old who didn’t have much income and had begged his parents to buy the books, I felt obliged to finish them.

That’s exactly what I did. Despite the struggle, I managed to read all three books. I felt proud of myself for preserving in spite of the lack of enjoyment I was getting out of them.

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