Even though this is a recorded podcast, you can always call us anytime.

The number is 8779-9-9-6673.

Leave your questions and stories about language, and you might just end up discussing them on the air with us.

Thanks for listening.

You're listening to Away With Words. I'm Grant Barrett.

And I'm Martha Barnett.

You know what it feels like to fall in love with a book.

Maybe you open to a random page and you trip over a beautiful passage and before you know it,

your head over heels. That's the falling in love part. But how do you know when it's time to

break up with a book? I mean, I look at my own bookshelves and I see lots and lots of failed

relationships, you know, books whose spines are wrinkled, but only up to a certain point, you know, the point where I moved on. It wasn't them. It was me.

It used to be that if I started a book, I felt obliged to finish it, and I'd soldier on through all the pages.

You know, I don't know why, just sort of thinking that that's what you're supposed to do.

You know, maybe there was some cosmic reason that the book and I ended up together.

And maybe there's something to be said for making yourself read all the way to the end.

But, you know, more and more I feel like I'm not

obligated at all to do that. And in fact, I feel even better reading what Samuel Johnson had to say

about this. He said that the notion that you have to finish every book is surely strange. You may as

well resolve that whatever men you happen to get acquainted with, you are to keep them for life.

A book may be good for nothing, or there may be only one thing in it worth knowing.

Are we to read it all through?

It's a good question, right?

...