Assuming you won’t take the advice to just set a bad book aside, here are some things that might help you get through a particularly boring or bad read. Hopefully you’ll never have to use much of this advice, but we will all encounter a bad book that fails to engage us at least a few times across our lives.
A Page Read Is a Page Less
When something is a slog, any amount of progress is another miniscule step towards no longer having to deal with said slog. This is a good thing to keep in mind regarding life as a whole.
In the case of books, if what you are reading is mind-numbingly boring or unenjoyable, every page you get through is a page closer to never having to pick up the book again. Most novels take around four or more hours to get through, so you won’t be losing days of your life to a bad story. And there’s always the chance that it can grow on you or find its footing as the plot progresses.
Read It as Quickly as Possible
As an extension of the point above, you can minimise the sense of how drawn-out and unenjoyable something is by gritting your teeth and getting through it.
If you push yourself through a bad novel within a couple of reading sessions, then it can quickly be put back on the shelf, given away, or even burned (if you really detested it). The more you put it off, and the less progress you make, the more gruelling attempting to read it will become.
Try to Find It Funny
If a work truly contains all the hallmarks of being cringeworthy and cliché, try to find the humour in how bad it is.
Just like those films that are ‘so bad that they’re good’, you can maybe apply similar sentiments to a read that you refuse not to finish. Of course, this will destroy any amount of seriousness within the plot, but I suppose the book has already failed to engage you, so go ahead and laugh at it.
Learn Through Example
If you want to be a writer and find that a book you are reading is, in your opinion, a complete mistake and waste of paper… use that as guidance to not repeat the mistakes and amateurish traits of that particular work within your own writing.
In truth, we can sometimes learn a lot more from mistakes — whether personal ones or those we witness others make — than good examples. Your writing ability is undoubtedly influenced by what you read, how much you read, and what you enjoy about fiction.
Avoid That Author and Similar Works
Similar to learning by example, learn to avoid what you don’t like by recognising and correlating authors and works to other comparable examples.
I really hated Samuel Bjork’s I’m Travelling Alone, so I’m never going to touch the likes of Jo Nesbo’s work, given that I noticed multiple comparisons between Bjork and Nesbo’s work. You should do the same by looking up what authors and books are similar to the one(s) you dislike, then avoiding those as best as you possibly can.
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