A couple of years ago, I was sitting in a creative writing workshop at my local university when the tutor made a confession. “I only give a book a handful of pages,” she said. “If it hasn’t hooked me by then, I put it down.” I thought her approach seemed a bit hasty. Who knows what lies beyond a lousy opening. What if the book gets better as it goes on? What if a slow burn blossoms into a literary marvel? “What if it doesn’t,” the tutor said to my objections. “Anyway, you’re young. You’ve got time to read to the end.”

Well, no argument on that last bit. But the thrust of her point didn’t sit well. Leaving a novel unfinished felt criminal to me, almost an insult to the author who had slaved over it. If I started something, I wanted to make good on the time I’d already invested. And if I wanted licence to form an opinion on it, surely that required reaching the finish line to see everything it had to offer?

For as long as I could remember, I’d been in the habit of ploughing through creative works I’d long since........

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