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TRY THE ‘PAGE 69’ TEST
When Should You Stop Reading A Book?
Here’s how I made the call on Percival Everett’s ‘James,’ a National Book Award winner and Pulitzer frontrunner
As a critic, I get a lot of books for free. It’s a great perk of the job.
I get books from publishers who want me to review them. I get them from NetGalley, a site that lets working critics download advance reader’s copies of forthcoming titles at no cost. When I was a judge of the National Book Critics Circle Awards, one of the three major American book prizes, I got them as part of the submission process.
That doesn’t count all the books I get from my unusually kind public library, which doesn’t save all of its discards for an annual sale but puts them out daily on a rolling cart, where they’re free to all takers.
What all of it means is that I seldom pay the average $25 or so for a new hardcover or $15 for a paperback. I buy books mainly to support author friends or my local indie bookstore or because there’s a classic I know I’ll want to keep. And I look for deals on Kindle or used copies when I do.
The last book I bought was a digital edition of Philip Roth’s 1960 National Book Award winner, Goodbye, Columbus, which I wanted to reread and was going for 99 cents during a Black Friday sale on Amazon.
Yet giving up on a book can be surprisingly hard even when it doesn’t involve a financial loss. I’ve been a critic for years— first for Glamour and then a large newspaper — and it never gets easier.
That has a lot to do with a vital lesson of book reviewing: Some authors take a while to find their footing or, in critics’ shorthand, to “get on top of a story.” You’d ideally give those writers a few chapters, though it isn’t always possible when you’re getting 400 copies a week from publishers, as I did when I edited the book section of a newspaper. But there’s no “right” number of pages to read: Every book is different.
How the ‘Page 69 Test’ can help
Some critics try to avoid quitting too soon by taking what’s known as the “Page 69 Test,” which readers can also use as a guide: Dip into a book…
