Fiction

#1. Forcing yourself through a book can help you grow as a reader.
Sometimes the only way to grow as a reader is to force yourself to read material that you're initially resistant to. For example, I almost bailed on Trainspotting when I discovered the book was written in really... uhhh... committed Scottish dialect and laced with profanity. Example:

They cunts've goat the fuckin poppy. You're the cunt thits eywis fuckin gaun oan aboot killin the rich n aw that anarchy shite. Now ye want tae fuckin shite oot! Begbie sneers at Rents, and it's, likes, very ugly n aw; they dark eyebrows oan toap ay they darker eyes, that thick black hair, slightly longer than a skinheid.

Thank goodness I stuck with it: the book proved to be one of my favorite reads of 2013. (I was late joining the Irvine Welsh party.)

#2. Bad novels can sometimes teach you a lot, even if it's not quite what the author intended.
A couple decades ago, I was about to vacation on North Carolina's Outer Banks, so I was grabbing and reading just about anything that was either about the Banks or used the locale of the Banks. One of the books was a mainstream romance novel, written for--how shall I put this?--the lowbrow female reader longing for a good shtupp with a hunk. (Hope I haven't offended, but so help me God, that's the truth, as you'll see by what follows.) I hated it. Hated it! But I stuck with it and managed to have a bit of fun by changing my approach from "Reader Looking for Enlightenment" to "Anthropologist Trying to Figure Out Just Who Would Want to Read This Stuff." Toward the end of the novel, I hit paydirt: There was a climactic lovemaking scene where the heroine, in a postcoital haze, looks down and notices the glowing hands of the man's watch on the nightstand--and the author took care to inform the reader that it was a Rolex watch. No, I'm not making this up. Clearly, these were readers not just looking for a good shtupp with a hunk--they were looking for a good shtupp with a hunk who wears a Rolex watch. I still laugh whenever I think about that scene. That was the novel in a nutshell and had I thrown the book aside, I would never have come across that ridiculous little gem.

#3. One word: Closure.
I simply can't stand the feeling I get when I've stopped reading a book I haven't finished. This may sound overblown, but it's the best way I can describe it: It's like not having attended the funeral of a relative you weren't close to, but knew. There's always this sense of incompletion, and something undone, and it's unsettling.