Abandoned Books - Jan thru May 2026

 I generally keep track of the books I’ve tossed aside, usually somewhere between 10 and 20 of them per year, just in case I might want to give them a second chance. During the first five months of 2026, I’ve abandoned seven books for one reason or another.

In the order of which I’ve abandoned them, these are the seven:

This is the first book I bought after acquiring my new Kobo Reader, and I really had high hopes for it since it was a National Book Award semi-finalist at one point. But I found Chain Gang All-Stars extremely difficult to read because its author decided to go all “pronoun crazy” on me. This is a “woke” book by any definition, but my only problem with it was tying to figure out if “they” and “them” were supposed to be singular or plural. The plot was interesting, but not interesting enough to keep me working so hard to figure out what easily could have been made obvious by simply using pronouns the way they were meant to be used. I got tired of re-reading whole paragraphs just to be sure that the author was only talking about one person instead of multiple ones.

I was looking for an Australian novel when I started reading A Hundred Small Lessons, and was drawn to this story about an elderly woman forced to leave her family for health reasons. Unfortunately/fortunately, the home she’s placed in is within walking distance of her old house, and she keeps coming back even though a young family has moved in. It’s probably me on this one, but it just became too much of a “Hallmark movie” to keep me turning pages…too predictable.

This one seemed like a natural fit for me, so I have now given its second, and final chance. Turns out that I don’t get much of a sense of the author’s “passion” from this collection of bookish essays he’s written over the years. Frankly, I found them to be very dryly written, and a little bit dull if read as a steady diet. I’m sure that many people have loved this one, and can tell me that I’m wrong about it. I’ll grant them that. Just not for me.  

I abandoned Every Day I Read for exactly the opposite reason that I quit on A Passion for Books. The South Korean author of this one took such an overwhelming cutesy approach here that I quickly realized I am not even remotely close to being part of her intended audience. I imagine this one got a big push on BookTock, exactly where its intended audience hangs out for a good time. For me, it was just too simplistic and obvious to get me past the book’s first few pages.

The Black Wolf is, by far, my biggest disappointment of the year. (Maybe it started with what I consider to be a pretty horrible cover.) I made it all the way through Penny’s 50-page recap of her previous book (barely), and then waded right in to her preachy anti-business, anti-American diatribe on global warming and Canadian sellouts willing to ruin Canada in order to enrich themselves. This one is a real downer of a story.

Rule of the Bone is my other big regret for 2026. I’ve had a copy of this one around the house for years, and this was my second attempt at reading it. I was surprised, or maybe not really all that surprised, I suppose, to end up quitting on it this second time around just a few pages past where I quit on it the first time I tried to read it. Russell Banks manages the near impossible here: a particularly repulsive storyline that still manages to be boring as heck.

I really didn’t get very far into this one. I will probably catch some flak for saying this, but I’ve grown weary about every book, movie, or television show being required for political correctness reasons to have at least one, or maybe a handful of LGBQT characters at the forefront. I’ve nothing against anyone’s personal life, not my business, but I think the group is overrepresented now to the point of ridiculousness - and, in the long run, that’s to the detriment of the very population being highlighted. Call it LGBQT fatigue, if you will. 

That’s it, so far. Looks like I’ll probably come in around 15 abandoned books again this year, right on schedule. How many do you guys give up on each year on average? I used to force myself, when I was much younger and had way more reading years still ahead of me than behind me, to finish every book that I began, but those days are long gone.