Why We Abandon Books

They have multiplied across my nightstand, and the stack is growing. Sticky notes, a pencil, junkmail postcards, and a receipt work as placeholders.

I actively read three to four books. I read a few pages from each book every night or switch from book to book. I have plenty of other reading friends who keep disciplined systems like these, sometimes with up to ten books.

Unfortunately, I started four books in December and have not returned to them since. Can I blame my attention in a distracted age? Certainly. Did I spend a lot of late night hours visiting instead of reading? You bet, but a few months have now passed. Is a book or two ready for the fatal Did-Not-Finish pile? Also a possibility. But I wonder if it’s something else that leads me to lay aside certain books.

Here are two examples. For a decade, I have wanted to read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel, from 1920, This Side of Paradise. I’ve taught many of Fitzgerald’s short stories and The Great Gatsby countless times. I might never find a character to truly cheer for in his work, but that is my opinion of course and also not the point of fiction. My margin notes and lines and boxes of every color reveal how I’ve learned and reflected on Fitzgerald’s works over the years as I taught them. I relish so much of his style and phrasing while I can also appreciate his critical eye of American society. Yet I stopped halfway through his instant bestseller. I don’t like Amory. I have left him at age twenty in the middle of Princeton in chapter 3 , and I’m not sure I care enough to read more. I feel a certain stubbornness or maybe ambivalence.

I also tried half of a nonfiction book by David Robson, The Laws of Connection. Once again, I began it months ago. I chose it because I had hoped to learn some new ways of conversing with others and our adult children at Christmas gatherings. After all, I heard a wonderful BBC interview with Robson about intentionally asking deeper questions to develop greater intimacy with friends and family. Studies and science and proof and data abound! How fascinating. How handy. But I didn’t finish.

Huge sticky notes jut out of the pages. I can see scribbled ends of words. I thought I needed this book. I didn’t go to great expense but had found a retired copy from an Ohio library. It had lasted in circulation for one whole year from 2024 to 2025. That may have been a clue. Or it didn’t find appeal in one small town in Ohio.

So was it too much mental work to read? No. It had a reasonable academic tone and practical tips for things to try in conversation. This book could help my communication skills. I would not have picked it up if I didn’t think that I had a need to grow. But I grew tired of notetaking, I think. I’m not sure I will even collate the notes I did take. I quit.

Maybe my reading taste buds are dull. Maybe I’m in a lazy slump. Do I need more books? More appealing choices? Am I even asking the right question?

Like me, C.S. Lewis asks dozens of book questions in his essay, “High and Low Brows.” In 1939, he addressed his thoughts about kinds of books to the English Society of Oxford. Yet my summary is inaccurate already. Lewis said that it was unfair to rank “degrees and kinds of merit.” It’s lazy to place things in categories without thinking through the distinctions. But he does believe there are contrasts between books. The main issue is to figure out how to talk about the differences.

As he examines this set of ideas, Lewis concludes at one point that books can be bad because of poverty of style and because a protagonist is shallow or foolish. That gave me pause. Perhaps that was one reason I disliked This Side of Paradise. Lewis thinks of all the common things we think of too: Do we rank books based on popularity or seriousness? Ease or difficulty? Vulgarity or virtue? The lists go on, but Lewis assures us we have failed if we continue to think this way. There is an answer, and it’s not a few simple categories. We need to expand how we see all books, to imagine “a whole series of vertical lines representing different kinds of work, and an almost infinite series of horizontal lines crossing these to represent the different degrees of goodness in each kind.” It would be an enormous chart.

I realized as I read Lewis’s analysis that I am guilty of one of the very dangers he warns against: oversimplification. I was looking for a single reason for why I quit reading one pile of books. In doing so, I wasn’t looking at each book for its individual merits. Lewis says any lowbrow book can have good and bad, and we can see the “same kinds of goodness and badness in books that are not lowbrow.” Even as I look back at the psychology of communication in The Laws of Connection, I can see both. I think I may return to it.

I find Lewis’s everyday wisdom helpful. It’s not that the books I have chosen are good or bad. The answer lies in my perspective, my state of mind. In the greatest of ironies or the greatest of book tests, my husband and I went book shopping on the weekend. I didn’t worry about whether my choices were lowbrow or highbrow. A huge bookstore in a neighboring town discounted all of its stock before it moved locations. What did I find appealing? Two John Grishams and one collection of poetry and prose from 1964, A Book of Comfort by Elizabeth Goudge.

Image Credit: Erik Desmazières, “The Library of Babel”