While I think Nick Hornby is overstating his case, the idea that "every time we pick up a book for a sense of duty and we find that we're struggling to get through it, we're reinforcing the notion that reading is something you should do but telly is something you want to do" is worth considering. Where we part company is his belief that a book that makes you "race through it" is a book worth reading. Speed freak. A book that makes you miss it when you're away from it, that's the ticket.

Richard always finishes a book he starts, and my mother was like this, too, but I have no trouble walking away with no regrets from a book that isn't doing it for me. Unless I'm at work, of course--I've finished p l e n t y of books under the duress of professional responsibility. Two I've never managed, though, despite the enthusiastic cheerleading of fellow readers I respect and whose tastes I generally agree with, are The Westing Game and A Wizard of Earthsea. They will just have to do without me, and they famously do.