Four books open on the nightstand. In three of them the bookmark sits around page twelve. The fourth has been face down for a month, in chapter two.
That pile looks like a character flaw and is something else: it is information.
Where a book gets abandoned tells you what happened. In the first pages it is almost always the cost of entry, and there is a documented effect that explains it. Halfway through it is usually pace. And if every book gets dropped every time, the cause sits outside the book.
This is reason 3 of ten reasons someone won’t read, from the after side.
Where do they stop? That’s the answer
Look at the bookmarks in the last three books they started:
| Where it stopped | What it usually means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Pages 1 to 15 | The entry toll: new context, new style | Read that stretch aloud to them |
| First third | The book’s promise arrived too late | Change books, and look at the pace |
| Right at the middle | Pace or length | Shorter books, shorter chapters |
| Near the end | Almost never a problem: they know how it ends | Let it go, they read it |
| All of them, always, anywhere | The cause sits outside the book | Check the other nine reasons |
The surprising row is the second-to-last: stopping near the end is normal. Once the plot has resolved in their head, the book did its job.
Stopping in the first pages: the entry toll
The first pages of a book are the hardest stretch of that book. It sounds odd, and it has a known explanation in language teaching.
Stephen Krashen calls it “the first few pages effect.” He describes it this way: readers of a new work “often report that they find the first few pages of a new author’s work tough going. After this initial difficulty, the rest of the book goes much easier.” And he gives the mechanism: “this is due to the fact that the context, the story, was new, and, in addition, the reader had not adjusted to the author’s style” (Krashen, Language Magazine, 2004).
Where that comes from, so you know. Krashen describes it in intermediate foreign-language students. Here we are talking about an eight-year-old reading in their own language. The mechanism he names — new context plus unadjusted style — is the same one operating in front of an unfamiliar author at eight, so the transfer is reasonable. Tested in that population, not yet.
What to do with it, and it is the cheapest thing in this article: read the first fifteen pages aloud to them. You are paying the toll on their behalf. After that the book runs downhill, and plenty of times they carry on without noticing.
Stopping halfway: the pace
This is the most common case and the one with least to do with willpower.
A book loses its reader when too long goes by without anything happening. In the craft of writing for children that has a known address: the stretch after the problem has been set up and before it starts to resolve. Writers who know it put something there; writers who don’t lose the reader at exactly that point. To see where those hinges sit, here are the parts of a story explained with an actual story.
From outside it diagnoses just as fast. Open it at the bookmark and read two pages: if nothing happens in two pages, you have your answer.
The way out is a different book, chosen better with three things you can measure with the book in your hands: pages, text per page, and how often something happens.
Stopping on all of them, every time
When it happens at any point, with any book, and has for months, the book is innocent.
That is when to look elsewhere: whether decoding still takes everything they have — in which case the story never arrives — whether their head hurts when they read, or whether the hour is wrong. The remaining nine causes are in the ten reasons, ordered from the cheapest to rule out to the slowest to change.
The way out that works: the series
If the problem is the entry toll, there is a way to pay it only once: make the next books belong to the same world.
Krashen calls it narrow reading, and the argument is direct. “Since each writer has favorite expressions and a distinctive style, and each topic has its own vocabulary and discourse, narrow reading provides built-in review.” And on context: “background knowledge is a tremendous facilitator of comprehension… the more one reads in one area, the more one learns about the area, and the easier one finds subsequent reading in the area.”
Translated to an eight-volume series: the first one costs, the second costs half, and from the third on the reader is at home. The characters are there, the world is there, the vocabulary repeats. The only new thing is the plot, which is what they came for.
The good objection: doesn’t reading the same thing over and over box them in? Krashen answers it: “deep reading in any topic will provide exposure to a tremendous amount of syntax and vocabulary that is used in other topics,” and readers “gradually expand their reading” on their own.
And if what they already finish is a run of graphic novels, that is narrow reading already working: what they read there carries more rare words per thousand than a children’s novel.
Is it bad to abandon a book?
Abandoning books is what people who read a lot do.
Somebody who reads twenty books a year starts thirty. Choosing, trying fifteen pages and putting it down is part of reading, and it is a skill worth learning early. The person who religiously finishes everything they start usually starts very little.
There is a practical reason to avoid forcing it too. In a survey of 1,755 British families, “more than eight in 10 children agree their favourite books –and the ones they are most likely to finish–are the ones they pick out themselves” (Scholastic, 2015). Forcing them through one they didn’t choose spends the little margin there is.
Where to start
This week, look at where the bookmark sits in the last one they dropped. If it’s on page twelve, read that stretch aloud tonight and stop where it gets good. If it’s halfway, go and get a shorter one.
And if it’s always anywhere at all, the book wasn’t the problem: the ten reasons are there.
Where these numbers come from
- Krashen, Stephen, “The Case for Narrow Reading,” Language Magazine 3(5), 17–19, 2004. The author describes the first-few-pages effect and narrow reading in the context of foreign language acquisition. Source
- Scholastic, Kids & Family Reading Report 2014, UK edition. A sample of 1,755 parents and children aged 6 to 17, fielded in summer 2015. Source
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