When to Put It Down: A Guide to Stopping Reading a Book

Of course, being a critic means getting plenty of free books into my hands. This is certainly an advantageous side of this job.

Then I receive books from all these publishers begging me to read them and let them know my thoughts through reviews. There's also NetGalley, which is a website where working critics can go to download advance reader's copies of forthcoming titles, with no charge at all. I received such books as a judge of the National Book Critics Circle Awards, one of three major American book prizes, as part of the submission.

This is without counting all the books I have received from my very generous public library, which does not reserve all his discards for an annual sale, but rather leaves them out daily on a rolling cart where they are available for hoarding by all.

All this means I can rarely spend the typical $25 or so on a new hardcover or $15 on a new paperback. Most of the time I buy the book just because it is for a friend author or my independent store in the area, or simply because there is a classic I know I will need. Even in such situations, I am careful to find Kindle deals or even used copies.

The most recent book that I purchased was an electronic version of Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus, which won the National Book Award for 1960 and which I wanted to reread. It was on sale for 99 cents during Black Friday and available on Amazon.

They can be surprisingly tough to give up-even, in the most straightforward situations, in which money isn't lost. So, though it was for years-first for Glamour and then a big newspaper-it has never been easier.

Much is because of a major personal lesson in book reviewing: some authors take time finding their ground or, in critics' shorthand, to "get over the story." You would have ideally liked to give such writers a few chapters, but that isn't always feasible when one is piling 400 copies a week from publishers, as I was when editing that newspaper's book section. But there is no such "right" number for pages to be read. Every book is different.

How the ‘Page 69 Test’ can help

Some critics avoid stopping prematurely by engaging in the so-called "Page 69 Test," which readers can also use as a guide: Open the book at approximately page 69. The Penguin copywriter Louise Willder gave the rationale behind this test in her Blurb Your Enthusiasm, an insider's view of book publicity:

"Forget covers, blurbs, reviews or introductions. Forget the book's first line. If you want to know if you're going to enjoy a book, open it at page 69. If you like what you read, buy the book. By then the author has settled into their story and has stopped showing off."

This has its worries too, for you might belong to a book club that mandates the reading of every selection with all the members and feel so guilty if ever you were caught not having done it. Or maybe you have received, as a holiday present, such a book from someone who loves it and wants to discuss it with you.

Then come the books that are either popular or became so acclaimed that they succumb to the "it must be me" syndrome: So many people seem to like a book that you wonder if you're just clueless.

One such is the bestselling novel James by Percival Everett, which retells the story of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with Jim as center rather than Huck. Since this year, when it was published, it already has earned the National Book Award and the Booker Prize nominations and obtained the kind of soaring reviews that put it in a frontrunner position for the Pulitzer for fiction.

Even in my small town in the Deep South, you can hardly find a book club that isn't reading James or thinking of putting it on its 2025 list.

I do admire Huckleberry Finn and have defended it, online and offline, against book banners trying to kick it from libraries. Yet I have the natural skepticism of journalism regarding the bandwagon like that which has made James an international bestseller. I've seen too many novels overpraised.

An editor’s view of the dilemma

This old friend of mine always comes to mind when I read those samples, someone I was very close to; he used to be the editor-in-chief of one of the very top Random House imprints and turned down books sent by literary agents with a very smooth tact:

"It didn't capture my heart."

That comes close enough to the truth of how many of us read-and certainly how I read-rather than all those much longer and more convoluted phrases that go by such names as "too little conflict" and "underdeveloped characters." We respond with our hearts as well as with our intellects.

For James, the free sample was generous: the first two chapters and part of the third or about three dozen pages. But nothing in it really ran away with my heart, and a bit of it had quite little appeal to me.

In one lesson, James teaches enslaved black children to speak "correct incorrect grammar" like "dat be" instead of "that is." He translates:

"White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don't disappoint them."

For the purpose of illustrating that principle, James provides pages of exemplary "correct, incorrect grammar" that he wishes young people, or others, to use in order to ingratiate themselves with their white enslavers.

Additionally, it was said, James made it very clear and historically valid: black people of that time had to pander to white slaveholders so as to survive.

But the pages in those early pages stopped me in my tracks for two reasons. First, I don't generally like reading long stretches of dialect, or any dialect, for that matter. The other was that those pages were overly didactic for my taste.

At times, Everett seemed to be coyly fawning over his readers, alternating lecturing with a wink that would hint at a cuter subtext of “I know you'll get this.”