You love reading. You want to learn more and keep your mind sharp. However, while you’ve enjoyed many life-changing masterpieces, there were also times when you spent hours grinding through a 500-pager you saw on a best-sellers list, only to find yourself at the end of it with very few useful insights.
It’s frustrating, but besides the annoying feeling of having wasted your time, there is the deeper problem of opportunity cost.
How many books will you ever read?
I try my best to read or listen to an audiobook for at least an hour a day. The audiobooks in my library right now are mostly between 6 hours and 20 hours long. On average, it takes me about 2 weeks to finish one book. In a year, that’s 25 books. If I keep this up consistently between the ages of 25 and 65, I’ll be able to read a total of 1,000 books in the course of my lifetime.
Now you might think, “that’s a lot of books!”, but considering all the books in the world that you could read, it’s just a drop in the ocean. In October 2012, Goodreads announced it has cataloged a whopping 395 million books. Out of that, one thousand is a mere 0.00025%! You might read more than me — or less — but you won’t be many orders of magnitude apart from this estimate. Even if you read at an astonishing speed of one book per day for 100 years, not missing a single day, you’d finish an impressive 36,500 books, but that’s still less than 0.01% of 395 million.
Knowing how to choose the books you read is important because you have a very limited capacity. Shoving everything on the best-sellers lists into your eyes isn’t the greatest idea.
Thus is born the valuable skill of identifying a not-so-useful book without having to go through its entirety. If you can read 20% of a book, realize it’s not useful and confidently put it away, you save the remaining 80% of your time to do something more productive.
How do I know when to stop?
In an age where social media has made popularity the definition of success and FOMO is a real thing, it’s become harder than ever to garner the confidence to say that something everyone else is reading isn’t worth your time. On top of that, the devious sunk cost fallacy monster, wielding anxiety in its left hand and perfectionism in its right, makes it oh-so-tempting to finish something you’ve already invested so much in.
To overcome these forces and put down the books we shouldn’t read, let’s first take a look at a simple tool that could help us decide which book we should be reading.
Your want-to-read list
Create a list where you’ll keep track of all the books you want to read. Along with the title of the book, also include the book’s “Guesstimated Utility Density” score, or GUD score for short, as an indicator of how good you think the book will be (pun intended).
To get the GUD score, you take the Guestimated Utility (GU) score of the book, and divided it by the book’s length (the number of pages if it’s a physical book, and the duration if it’s an audiobook). How to evaluate a book’s GU score depends on what makes a book useful, and that’s different for every reader. You can create any guestimation method you like, just make sure you apply it consistently to all the books you add to the list. (More on this later.)
Once you have some books in your list, rank them by their GUD score in decending order. Each time you add a book, maintain the ranking.
Now all you need to do is make sure you are always reading the book at the very top of the list, and you will be guarranteed — to the best of your ability to accurately estimate a book’s utility to you — to be making the most out of your reading efforts at any given point in time. The last thing you’ll need to do, is update the book’s GUD score as you read. Every chapter or so, give the book a new GUD score based on how useful the portion you’ve already read was.
With this set up, we now have all the elements we need to define the perfect stopping point. You should stop reading a book when its GUD score falls below that of any other book on your want-to-read list. The reason is simple: there now another book with a higher estimated return for your time investment.
Perfect! We have found an equation. The logic is sound and everything makes sense. The engineering minds rejoice!
Assume that you are now always reading the book at the top of your want-to-read list. Every book you pick up should start of with the highest GUD score. For it reach a point where you decide to stop reading it, the GUD score has to fall. So what are some key indicators that the book is not going to be as gud as you hoped? Here are 4 that you can consider.
1. It’s full of fillers
By fillers, I mean things that can literally be stripped out of the book entirely without affecting the contents semantically at all.
In high school, my English teacher made a point to grade our papers on conciseness. If a sentence was redundant or made unnecessarily long for the obvious sake of reaching the word count, he took off points on the basis that the writing is not concise. He also gave us exercises where we were asked to cross out as many words as possible from an unconcise piece of writing while keeping the author’s original message intact.
Ask yourself if the book you’re reading passes the “conciseness test”, that is, if you ripped a page out and gave it to a high school student as a conciseness exercise, will the page come back with most of its contents? If not, this should be a major red flag that indicates the author has very little substance to write about.
Sometimes these fillers disguise themselves in the form of irrelevant humour that’s both cringy and distracting. Good humour should be well-woven into the writing and few in occurrence. It serves to lighten the mood, or make the material easier and more enjoyable to read but does not steal the spotlight. If the book is full of jokes that are trying way too hard to be funny, often abrupt and barely related to the main point being made, it’s just a filler. These types of jokes are horrible because they take away your attention while giving back nothing useful. It’s extremely frustrating because, after all, how can a reader take a piece of work seriously if the author wouldn’t?
When reading, if you find yourself constantly distracted by needless verbal junk, endless paraphrasing, or jokes that barely connect to the topic at hand, stop, put it away, and go do something more productive.
2. It’s off-topic
Sometimes, to fill more chapters, an author would diverge the writing to a whole different topic instead of using the easy-to-spot fillers. It’s slightly more sneaky because, on the surface level, you don’t feel like you are reading junk. However, it stems from the same root problem as the fillers — a lack of substance.
If a book bears a title that suggests it would teach you an efficient journaling method, that should be exactly what the majority of the book is about. Anything else in the book should at least serve the purpose of supporting the reasoning of the journaling method. If halfway through, the author starts spending chapter after chapter talking about how to organize your goals in a way that’s completely independent of journaling, that’s off-topic and you should consider closing it up.
An author with an important point to make would never voluntarily undermining that point with irrelevant information. If two unrelated points are equally important, then you will find them in two separate books! Not only are off-topic content distracting and a sign that the author is running out of meaningful things to say, but they also are never quality content. If the off-topic content was of high quality, it would have been the focus of the book instead. The fact that you found it under a completely different title means you will most certainly find books dedicated to the same topic, but with much higher quality. Go find and read that book instead of wasting your time with this one.
3. A good book doesn’t tout its goodness
A majority of books that I’ve regretted reading started by telling me how good it is. I’ve even come across a best-seller that quoted entire paragraphs of positive reviews from its readers! For half of the book, I might as well have been reading the Yelp page of a restaurant, except on a real Yelp page, I wouldn’t be shown only the 5-star reviews.
More than just the insufferable ego of the author that you’ll have to put up with, a book that spends so much of its volume on trying to convince you that it’s good, probably isn’t. A book with real value doesn’t need to do anything else other than showing you its content. That alone should be enough to convince you, and anything else should immediately raise your suspicion.
Self-touting is distracting, annoying, and wastes the precious time readers have for the author to get the point across. If the author has anything important and valuable to say, all they need to do is write it down, and their readers will do more touting for them than they could ever do themselves.
4. There is a similar book you’ve already read
As you would probably agree, coming across an unhelpful book can be quite frustrating, especially to people who are genuinely trying to learn something useful with the limited time they have. This is perhaps the only case that doesn’t upset me at all.
The truth is, there are more books than there are topics to write about. For the same topic, you’ll likely be able to find more than one book that’s worthwhile to read. Reading something that you’ve just read again — depending on your purpose for reading — might not be so useful. While I’ve avoided mentioning any actual book up to this point (because, well, I don’t want to recommend you books I think aren’t worth your time), here are — in my humble opinion — three sets of good books that fall under very similar topics.
- Willpower by Roy F. Baumeister, John Tierney and The Willpower Instinct by Kelly McGonigal
- The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg and Atomic Habits by James Clear
- Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson and Becoming Steve Jobs by Brent Schlender
Of course, while the topics are the same, the contents and perspectives of these books do vary. If you’re researching a specific topic, then it makes sense to read extensively different books on that topic to see various points of view. However, if you’re new to the topic and aren’t looking to become an expert, then reading two books on the same topic back to back can be redundant.
For example, if you’re not a psychologist and have just read The Power of Habit to understand and improve your habits, reading Atomic Habits right after means you’ll likely come across many concepts that you’ve just learned. The better approach would be to stop reading Atomic Habits once you realize the contents are similar (or maybe one look at the title is enough to tell) and come back to it in a few months if you’re still interested. By then, it would serve the dual purpose of refreshing the concepts you already know while providing a new perspective and some new contents.
You can always go back
I hope this will be useful next time you try to decide on whether to stop reading a book or not.
One thing to note is that at this point, we are so caught up in trying to figure out if we should stop reading a book or not, that perhaps we forget one simple yet very powerful truth: the books won’t run away. So if you’re not sure, you might as well stop! It’s as simple as that. If you have the slightest doubt, and there are other books you could be reading, stop and move on! It’s not an eternal decision to never look at that book again. It’s not even a heavy decision that’s worth sweating about. You can always come back to it later, and it will still be the same book.
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