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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
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…