What page 80 asks of a reader

In July 2013 Goodreads asked its members when they give up on a book they aren't enjoying, and the second most common answer in the results it shared was "50-100 pages in." The most common answer was that they don't give up at all. More than a third of those who responded said they still feel bound to reach the last page, even if it takes them years. Goodreads didn't say how many members took part, so the figures describe a crowd of keen readers on one website and very little beyond that. But the zone they point to is easy to recognise.

What has run out by page 80

The opening of a novel has to sell it, first to an agent, then to an editor, then to someone holding it in a bookshop. Those pages run on a kind of borrowed energy: a strange situation, a voice introducing itself, the small thrill of not yet knowing which names will matter. By page 80 most of that is spent. The people have been introduced and the situation has stopped being strange. The book hasn't yet shown what it means to do with any of it, so the reader is extending credit to a writer who has offered a setup and a promise that it will be worth the hours still to come.

That's a different request to the one the first page made. A thriller can cover the gap with a body, and a slow family novel mostly has nothing to put there. Among the books the same Goodreads survey found had left the most readers unimpressed were Ulysses and Atlas Shrugged, long books which keep asking for that credit across hundreds of pages.

Jordan Ellenberg, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, tried to measure the drop-off in 2014 with what he called the Hawking Index. In a piece for The Wall Street Journal, he took the five most highlighted passages in a book's Kindle edition and used their average position as a rough guess at how far readers got. Highlighting is a crude stand-in for reading, and the index can only show where people stopped marking passages, never where they closed the book.

Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time scored 6.6 percent on that index, while Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, a novel of nearly 800 pages, scored 98.5.

Two permissions to quit

The modern case for putting a book down has two well-known sources. Daniel Pennac's Comme un roman lists ten rights of the reader, and the third is the right not to finish a book (le droit de ne pas finir un livre). Gallimard published it in 1992. Most of the book is an argument about children and school, about how adults who skip pages and abandon novels freely turn reading into a duty for the young.

Nancy Pearl, then a librarian at the Seattle Public Library, put a number on it in Book Lust in 2003. She calls it the rule of fifty. A book gets 50 pages. Readers over 50 subtract their age from 100, so a reader of 70 owes a novel 30 pages. She also points out that nothing stops anyone from going back to an abandoned book later, in six days or six years.

Where the attention argument lands

Pennac's permission is open, a right with no deadline attached. Pearl's is a budget that shrinks as the reader's remaining years do. Neither rule says anything about page 80, and for anyone under 50 that page falls just past Pearl's line, at the point where the rule has already said keep going and the book hasn't paid it back yet.

Talk about quitting books now usually comes wrapped in worry about phones and short attention, as if giving up at page 80 were a symptom. Both permissions were written before smartphones existed. Pennac's target was the child who stops reading altogether, and his list treats dropping a single book as part of what keeps a reader going.

Pearl's six days or six years makes the same point as another right on Pennac's list, the right to reread. It suggests something small and practical: a novel abandoned around page 80 is worth shelving with a slip of paper at the page where it lost you, because that is where a second attempt can pick up.