Read Street regular Patrick emailed that he had thought of a good book line but had no place to use it: "A half-read, half-bad book is a curse." A bad book you can discard. A good book is a pleasure. The majority of books, though, are half bad. Discarding one partway through feels like failure. Finishing one feels like a long bad trek.

Good line -- and thought -- Patrick. I have a hard time NOT finishing a book once I've started it. Maybe I'm a little too goal-oriented. Or maybe I'm too optimistic, waiting for a shallow plot to turn to gold. Whatever. I've made the "long bad trek" too often.

In the past couple of years, I can only think of one book that I left undone -- Parting the Waters by Taylor Branch. And it's certainly not because the book was bad, or even half-bad. I just got distracted in the middle and never regained the momentum. It still sits on a shelf in my den, the bookmark a silent weight on my conscience.

Maybe the key is to make sure our expectations match our reading picks? Many of us hold beach books to a different (read lower) standard than books that are expected to carry us through the grim winter months.