(No. 1) Quit reading that shitty book
Why quitting is your secret super power
The scene begins like this: I’ve made myself a cup of English breakfast tea and a buttered crumpet (with honey, because this is my afternoon off, and I want butter and honey). I position myself on the sofa, legs draped over the arm rest, so that I can easily reach my coffee table with my right hand. My left hand holds a book: The House in the Cerulean Sea, by TJ Klune. It’s been a few days since I’ve picked up the book (okay, more like two weeks, but who’s counting), and I’ve decided that this afternoon I’m going to finish it and tick one more title off my reading list.
There’s only one problem: I can’t stand the book.
But I’m already 170 pages in, and if I power through, I can probably finish it in the afternoon anyway. Then again, this is my afternoon off, damn it, and I want to enjoy it. Should I just put the book down … and quit?
Like a lot of breakup deliberations, this one is more drawn out and more painful than necessary. The red flags dotted the first chapter: I didn’t care about the protagonist (I don’t love stories about middle-aged men, sorry not sorry), I could see where the moral of the story was headed (it was unoriginal and obvious), and I was bored (reading a book about magic, no less!). I’ve read enough books to know that if I see these warning signs in the opening pages, there’s little to no hope that I’m going to get along with the book later on. But you know how it is at the beginning of a relationship: you’re infatuated with the idea of what you could be together, and you explain away the negative nudges in the hopes that your fantasy comes true. (I just gave away too much away about myself, didn’t I?)
My internal monologue goes something like this:
You bought this with your gift card! Your birthday card that you’ve been saving for months and promised only to use for books that will change your life. You can’t let it go to waste. It has a 4.5 rating on Goodreads! Therefore it has to get better, right? If you don’t like it, you must be heartless. One reader described it was ‘wonderfully life-affirming’ and said that it gives them ‘the hope in humanity that [they] desperately need.’ You don’t believe in hope, Rachel?
And then there was the real kicker:
Come on, you’re already a third of the way through the book. Are you really going to give up on it now, when you’ve already put time, money, and energy into it? Can you ever see anything through, or are you just a big quitter?
It sounds dramatic, I know. But my inner monologue had quickly gone from a mundane debate with myself about reading a book to a moralizing of my actions, and in turn, a judgment on what type of person I really am. In other words, deciding to quit the book was no longer about whether I should finish the book or not. Instead, it was about what quitting a book would say about me.
I grunted, turned the page, and began skimming.
Culturally, we regard quitting as a weakness. Quitting means giving up. Resigning. Lacking resilience and conviction. Not seeing things through. Quitting is not only a character flaw, but a kind of moral failing—a means to evaluate whether someone is a good person. Heroes never quit. Heroes persevere and prevail over quitters too cowardly to see things through. This kind of messaging is everywhere: sports commentary, rags-to-riches stories, illness narratives, and in books, of course.
The place I’ve most deeply internalized the moral failure of quitting is in romantic relationships. In the aftermath of ending various relationships that didn’t feel quite right in my late teens and twenties, I was told by various partners that I ‘give up too easily,’ that I am ‘always looking for greener pastures,’ that I ‘can’t see anything through when it gets tough.’ After being called all sorts of colorful language, too, I came to associate ending a relationship with being careless, noncommittal, and weak—in other words, being a Quitter. At some point after a string of these breakups, I vowed never to end a relationship again; if I felt that urge to end a relationship, I promised myself, that I would wait it out.
Because what did it say about me if I was a quitter?
Well, needless to say, this tactic didn’t work out well for me, even if my relationships did last longer. In one relationship, when it was obvious that our lives no longer aligned, I waited it out, let communication fizzle, and hoped that he would take the initiative instead—because I was committed, after all. (He did initiate the breakup conversation, eventually.) Although I was upset about the breakup because it was more about circumstance than compatibility, my deepest grief was not for the relationship itself: I was mourning a piece of me that died in that moment, the piece of me that knew what she wanted and didn’t want, and who acted on these feelings. Waiting for him to trigger the breakup conversation meant that I became a passive bystander.
I had allowed someone else to be the conductor of my own life.
But hey, at least I wasn’t a quitter.
Despite this experience, I held to this don’t-be-a-quitter and see-things-through narrative in a subsequent relationship. Even before our first date, I knew we weren’t long-term compatible. Our values and politics did not align (but he’s nice to me, so he must be a good person, right?), he exhibited some toxic masculine behavior on our second date (but he felt remorseful and proclaimed his love, so I should give him a second chance, right?), and my friends didn’t like him (but they don’t need to be involved in our relationship, it’s just between us two, right?). A few years down the road of this kind of second-guessing myself, I had grown accustomed to living an external life that did not align with my internal one: laughing at jokes I didn’t find funny, hanging out with his friends whom I didn’t like, lying to my friends about how I really felt in the relationship.
And all for what?
What I hadn’t seen at the time was that by not quitting these relationships, I was giving up on something more important: me. My gut instinct, my feelings, my priorities, my values, my desires, my wants, my needs.
I reposition myself on the sofa and take another sip of tea. It’s now lukewarm, and I’m still on Page 170.
Sometime last year, a friend in my PhD writing group was deliberating whether to back out of co-authoring a paper with a colleague. She didn’t have the time, and it was likely the bulk of the work would fall to her. But could she end this commitment? After all, she had already said yes, and she wasn’t sure if another opportunity like this one would come along.
One of the other students said to think of it like this: “Saying ‘no’ to something means saying ‘yes’ to something else.”
Saying no to something means saying yes to something else.
While this statement sounds like an affirmation one might find scrolling on Instagram (I’m not sure why I say that with derision—I love a good Insta quote), it resonated with me. I think it also offers a way to reframe quitting. What if quitting isn’t just saying no, but a way of saying yes to something else?
Walking away from relationships in my twenties (including that awful match I just described) was my yes. Yes to bigger love, yes to more respect, yes to more fun, yes to more compatibility, yes to better boundaries. What might have looked like giving up from my exes’ perspective(s) felt like the opposite to me: not giving up on myself, not abandoning my values, not settling for a life that didn’t quite fit. The ‘quitter’ narrative was just a story I told myself (and was told by others) that took me away from myself.
I lick the butter off my fingers and rest the book, open face, on my chest.
Compared to ending a relationship, quitting a book seems like a relatively low stakes decision. Of course, that’s not how it felt to me 170 pages into The House in the Cerulean Sea. Wasting my gift card, losing out on a potentially moving storyline beloved by others, regretting time I had already spent reading, and ultimately, being a quitter, were all on the line.
But just like those romantic relationships that were a bad, I reframed my hesitancies to put the book down as problems with me. And because I was the problem, not the book, I felt obligated to keep reading.
And therein lies the real stakes: not what’s lost when giving up something or someone that doesn’t feel right, but what’s lost when you hold onto it anyway. With this book, the real stakes were not what I would lose should I quit reading, but what I would sacrifice should I continue. My discernment, my desires, my inner compass were at risk—parts of me infinitely more valuable than what I had been weighing when initially making this decision.
For those of us who have been conditioned to question our desires, quitting something that feels wrong is an act of self-trust. Of resistance. Of self-love. Of undoing internalized narratives that serves a status quo rather than us. It’s a way of affirming, there is nothing wrong with me for feeling this way!
At the time of writing, I’m at a major life crossroads. Despite having only recently finished my doctorate, I’m considering leaving academia, at least for a while. And the doubts are creeping in: But why would you leave academia after coming so far? What was the purpose of those student loans? You’ll never be able to come back if you leave!
I want to be brave enough to say yes my gut feelings. To value my time. To be curious about the unknown. To set boundaries. To be intentional in my choices. To be discerning. To believe there is more waiting for me. To defy expectations.
I want to cherish and act from the deepest, fullest part of me.
Choosing to leave something—a book, a person, a place, a career—will always involve internal debate. But we can practice listening to that true inner voice: amplifying the words that are ours until they drown out the voices that were never really ours in the first place. And we can—and should—act on that inner compass in our day-to-day life so that we know what it feels like to act on our desires when the bigger life moments come along.
So, quit reading shitty books when you know they’re shit so you can practice saying yes to yourself. I will cheer you on when you do!
In the end, I put down my own shitty book—not on the coffee table to read later, but in my donation pile. I spent the afternoon befriending neighborhood cats on a fresh air walk (after my second buttered crumpet, of course) and browsing the bookshelves at a local Oxfam. Good riddance to the gift card, good riddance to the time I spent reading. Farewell to the quitter narrative. I didn’t even know what I was saying yes to except for that little voice that said, I want more.
Thank you.
Thanks for reading! I’ll be back with more thoughts soon, but in the meantime, let me know if you have any thoughts about quitting shitty books/quitting in general/whatever’s on your mind. (Have you tried reading this TJ Klune book? Do you agree it’s shit? Is there another book everyone loved that you just couldn’t stand?) Comments are on, friends. :)
x Rachel
Quitting IS a superpower because it shows decisiveness and intention. Well done.
This was VERY inspiring, timing is PERFECT w.r.t. where I am now
Thanks Rachel!
-Marta, Solly's friend :)