Member-only story

TRY THE ‘PAGE 69’ TEST

When Should You Stop Reading A Book?

Here’s how I made the call on Percival Everett’s ‘James,’ a National Book Award winner and Pulitzer frontrunner

Janice Harayda
Thought Thinkers
Published in
7 min readDec 29, 2024

--

Percival Everett and the cover of “James”
Percival Everett and the cover of “James” / Penguin Random House

As a critic, I get a lot of books for free. It’s a great perk of the job.

I get books from publishers who want me to review them. I get them from NetGalley, a site that lets working critics download advance reader’s copies of forthcoming titles at no cost. When I was a judge of the National Book Critics Circle Awards, one of the three major American book prizes, I got them as part of the submission process.

That doesn’t count all the books I get from my unusually kind public library, which doesn’t save all of its discards for an annual sale but puts them out daily on a rolling cart, where they’re free to all takers.

What all of it means is that I seldom pay the average $25 or so for a new hardcover or $15 for a paperback. I buy books mainly to support author friends or my local indie bookstore or because there’s a classic I know I’ll want to keep. And I look for deals on Kindle or used copies when I do.

The last book I bought was a digital edition of Philip Roth’s 1960 National Book Award winner, Goodbye, Columbus, which I wanted to…

--

--

Thought Thinkers
Thought Thinkers

Published in Thought Thinkers

A community for readers, writers, poets, satirists, creatives, and thinkers of thoughts

Janice Harayda
Janice Harayda

Written by Janice Harayda

Critic, novelist, award-winning journalist. Former book editor of the Plain Dealer and book columnist for Glamour. Words in NYT, WSJ, and other major media.

Responses (100)