Books I stopped reading

3 great reads

There are lots of reasons to stop reading a book — even a great book.

Sometimes you need a reading reset. Sometimes a specific struggle in your life means you can’t read anything that’s too close to home. Sometimes a book will be a great fit for you, someday – but it’s not what you need right now, with where you are in your real life and in your reading life and the ways they intertwine.

For more tips on the reading life and plenty of book recommendations, you can check out my mini podcast, Reading Like an Adult. Each episode is 15 minutes or less, and in this second season, I’m exploring frameworks that make my reading life better.

Here are three great reads that I started at the wrong time and hope to return to someday (check out s2e4 of Reading Like an Adult for more examples):

The Memoir Club by Laura Kalpakian — I made it around 100 pages into this story about a group of women who meet in a writing class and create their own memoir club. It’s a book about how each of us has an incredible story to share if we can find the voice to share it, and I stopped reading it for the best reasons. The Memoir Club features characters who feel real and draw you into their lives, so I couldn’t help being emotionally invested in the story, and it wasn’t the right time for me to have emotional space for the struggles of fictional characters.

Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino — I picked up, loved, and almost immediately put down Trick Mirror. It’s an essay collection about feminism, technology, the rise of internet culture, and the forces that shape us in the online age – whether we like it or not. I only read the first essay on my first reading attempt, but I found the writing to be sharp, canny and funny. In a way, it was too good to read at that specific moment. I was busy and distracted, and I had an intimidating stack of library books that even I couldn’t finish in time. What I decided to do is add Trick Mirror to my 2022 reading list. It was the right decision for me to wait on this book, even though I think it will be a perfect read for me, because I want to read it at a time when I can give it my full attention.

The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin — This epic urban fantasy is both bestselling and beloved. Its sweeping journey and rich characters didn’t disappoint, but my attention span couldn’t handle the 50-page scenes that typically made up one chapter of the novel. (This is absolutely my broken brain’s fault, and N.K. Jemisin is not to blame in the least.) I tried both print and audio for this book, and while I thought the narrator was a perfect choice, the audio version featured additional sound effects that startled me every time. I’m hopeful I’ll return to it in the print version — and get to meet all six avatars — sometime in the near future.