This week’s Book Blogger Hop, hosted by Coffee Addicted Writer, poses a question I recently answered for Top Ten Tuesday (which I think is interesting).

Elizabeth over at Silver’s Reviews asks

How many books have you started, but just couldn’t finish?

On Tuesday, my Top Ten list was about books I’d recently abandoned, and I’ve recently created an abandoned shelf on Goodreads.

I don’t have a number, but I do have some thoughts. In the last few years, I’ve changed how I feel about abandoning books. For most of my career as a reading teacher, I read books so that I could recommend them to my students. This meant that I finished books that I didn’t enjoy because I figured I’d have students who would be interested and I needed to have all of the book knowledge.

When I moved to the next town over (an hour away from the school where I teach) I became more stingy with my time. Part of that stinginess came from getting married and adapting to married life, and the other part came from a desire to use the reading time I had reading things that I enjoyed.

So I didn’t abandon books before, but I do now. I used to feel bad about not wanting to finish a book because someone put so much work into it. But I understand that every book is not going to strike every reader’s fancy, and I can let that apply to me and my reading life as well.