As any reader knows, sometimes you just cannot connect to a book the first or second time you pick it up. Yet if you pick that same book up at a later date and start reading you may actually fall in love with it.

I have noticed that music works the same way for me as well. I may not like an artist or type of music at one point in my life, but later at another point in life, I can easily find myself a passionate fan of what I had earlier disdained.

Nancy Pearl suggests that readers have in mind “the rule of 50.” If you are under age 50, you give a book 50 pages. If it does not hook you, let it go for now. If you are over 50, as I am, she suggests the sum of 100 pages minus your age. Since I am 64 (soon to be 65), that means I should give a book 36 pages to make its case to my heart.

Since I read primarily on my Kindle or Kindle App, I have tried translating that number of pages into a percentage of pages read. So assuming the average novel is 300+ pages, I should read anywhere between 3-5% of a novel to see if it is a good fit.

I have tried to follow that advice but find that I have not been very successful at keeping the page total that low. What I end up doing more often is reading 25%, 40% even 50% or more of a book before abandoning it.

The biggest problem with this habit is that a few years later, when I go to pick up that book again I face this choice: do I actually want to re-read the first 40% of a novel I have already abandoned once? More often than not, I just count the book that I have already spent so much time with as just another “lost cause.”

Going through my reading notes and my Kindle Library I see an embarrassing number of what are generally considered good to great books that fit into the category of Lost Cause.

For example, I have read and abandoned the following books after spending a significant amount of time with them:

• Ulysses, James Joyce (64%)
• Moby Dick, Herman Melville (83%)
• Bleak House, Charles Dickens (71%)
• The Ambassadors, Henry James (52%)
• Les Miserables, Victor Hugo (68%)

Sometimes, I think of them as books I have “read” since I have spent so much time with their language and style and generally know how they “end.” Other times though, they hang around my neck like an albatross, shaming me, reminding me of my weakness and incompleteness.

In those moments of doubt, I console myself with the idea that: sure, I will pick Moby Dick up again after a few decades now and start the whole thing again.

But who am I kidding? The Pequod has sailed. Ishmael, Ahab, and Queequeg are already rendezvousing with their white whale. And I am left here on shore, pondering the life choices I have made.