The best readers actually quit a lot of books. Life is too short to read books you don’t enjoy reading.

Permission to abandon mediocre books

We're taught to finish what we start—it's a virtue, a mark of discipline. But somewhere this became twisted into finishing books we actively dislike, slogging through pages out of stubbornness or guilt. The irony is that the people who actually read the most aren't the ones white-knuckling their way through mediocre novels. They're the ones willing to put a book down at page fifty and pick up something better.

This matters because reading time is one of your scarcest resources. Every hour spent on a book that isn't working is an hour you're not discovering something that will actually change how you think. There's something almost arrogant about forcing yourself through a book that doesn't deserve your attention—as if completing it proves something. Real readers, the voracious ones, understand that quitting is how you optimize. You develop taste by reading widely and ruthlessly.

The slightly counterintuitive part: setting a book aside doesn't mean you failed at reading. It means you succeeded at respecting your own time. And that's the skill that actually builds lifelong readers—not guilt, but permission. Permission to be selective, to change your mind, to spend your finite reading life on things that genuinely captivate you.