Booking Through Thursday: Finishing

Today's questions are from me (!). Wow, thanks Laura!

1. Do you finish every book you start, no matter how bad it gets? Why?
   
   This is my dark little secret…a large portion of the books I start I never finish. It’s odd. I used to assiduously plow through every book that I started, no matter how tedious the read became but for the last few years, if the book isn’t doing it for me, it gets put away. As a consequence, I have well over ten books at all times lying around that I am started and couldn’t bring myself to finish. Some just got really, really bad, some I just wasn’t in the right frame of mind to read, and some made me dread the ending so much that I just couldn’t read on anymore. (Empire Falls, a book by Richard Russo falls into this last category. I was so distressed by the sense of impending doom and so attached to the well-being of the characters that by the last third of the book, I just couldn’t read further.)


2. Do you ever sneak-read the ending before you finish the book? If so, what about the book tends to cause you to do so?
   
   Most of the time I don’t but there are two exceptions…books where it becomes so dreary (but I feel compelled for some reason to finish) that I skip ahead so that I can be done sooner and books where it becomes so nail-bitingly intense that I look ahead (just a peek at a sentence or two!) to reassure myself or just to relieve the tension. Silly, isn’t it?

Late-bloomer