Ali Hassan

I usually give a book one hundred pages before I give up on it and put it back on the shelf. But in the case of very long or very short books this rule has its limitations. To account for these cases, I have devised the following formula to determine the point where it is acceptable to give up:

(Where p is the number of pages, and RRP is the recommended retail price.)
For example, if you’ve been trying to read Blood Meridian (352 pp, $14.95) and have been finding it a little tiresome, you’d need to make it to page seventy-four before you could quit it legitimately.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 15th, 2006 at 5:05 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.