The Guide #164: The quit list – when to give up on that book, TV show and more

It’s list-making season for those of us who write about culture, the point of the year where we tot up all the things we’ve consumed in the past 11-and-a-bit months and try to decide which of them is the best. For me, this exercise always comes with a pang of guilt over the culture I either haven’t got around to watching/listening to/reading or, even worse, started and then never finished. Books pile up on the bedside table, podcasts sit dormant in my series feed, and TV shows lie half-watched on the (far too) many streaming services I’ve signed up for.

In the age of so-much content, this isn’t a problem confined to professional list-makers. But should you stick with that TV show, game, podcast or book you’ve been struggling through, or should you abandon ship? To help you in that tricky decision, I’ve asked some of the Guardian’s sage cultural heads for their advice:

When to give up on a …

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Book

Some people seem to view reading as the kind of “eating your greens” of entertainment – I guess because of the widespread tendency to look down on screen time, with books being a morally superior option. But amid all that, let’s not forget that reading for pleasure is supposed to be pleasurable – so there’s no need to continue doing it if it feels like a chore.

That said, there may be occasions when you feel obliged to finish a book you’re not enjoying – perhaps you’re in a book club and want to be able to take part in the discussion – and it’s not necessarily a bad thing to understand why you don’t like something. But that’s the great thing about a book: you are in control of how you consume it. Skim it! Listen to the audiobook on 1.25 speed! Flick past pages if you want to! Personally, I’ll normally try to read about 50 pages of a book before giving up on it – if I’m not feeling it by then, I probably won’t. That’s not to say I won’t come back to it: I didn’t finish Mrs Dalloway, a book I now love, on my first attempt. But completely abandoning a book doesn’t need to feel like a failure, either – you’ve won back time to spend on something you actually like. Lucy Knight, editor of the Guardian’s Bookmarks newsletter

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TV show

As I get older, I get more OK with the idea of bailing from an unenjoyable piece of entertainment. My hours in this world are finite – do I really want to waste them trying to like that awful Lord of the Rings show (above)? You can’t bail after one episode, because then you’ll leave yourself open to accusations that you didn’t give the thing a fair shake. Make it to the halfway point, though, and it becomes a sunk cost. As such, it’s best to give up after the third episode. Or even during the third episode, if you’re feeling especially hardcore.

Sometimes, however, shows get wise to this and start promising you a twist further down the line that will make you re-evaluate the entire series. Reader, do not be fooled by these. Such a promise made me labour on with Apple TV+’s tedious Disclaimer for three episodes more than I should have done (which is to say I watched four episodes). But it was so limp, so wan, so unbearably pleased with itself that eventually I couldn’t take it any more and just Googled the bloody twist. This is a life-changing move. In 2025 I urge all of you to Google the twist and live your life. Stuart Heritage, author and culture writer for the Guardian

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Podcast

Honesty is key when it comes to shedding the podcast deadwood. Sure, you might want to be that person who listens to a current affairs pod at 5am between running 40km and #manifesting, but if it’s started to feel like a chore and your list of unlistened-to episodes is piling up each day, it might be time to unsubscribe and find a weekly show instead. At the very least, pause those automatic downloads – your phone will thank you.

It is also possible that you’ve misaligned your pod with your routine; I found Brian Reed’s journalism ethics series Question Everything a little dense, until I realised that I’d listened to every episode on a packed commute while answering work emails, paying bills and confirming my presence at about eight hen dos a week. Similarly, Kill List – the new runaway hit series about a murder-for-hire site – was definitely not a holiday listen, especially on a holiday where I was mostly alone and thus improbably worried about someone taking a hit out on me.

But, especially with narrative series, if you find yourself frequently rewinding through episodes because you weren’t listening the first time around, or even – God forbid – you’ve accidentally listened to an episode twice, it’s time to ask yourself whether you simply don’t care enough about the show at hand. There are just too many great series around to bother with anything mid. Hannah J Davies, culture writer

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Game

Look, it’s not the 90s any more. We don’t all have infinite hours to spend throwing ourselves at the same impossibly difficult Mega Man level. There’s no obligation to complete a game before you move on. But if you ditched a video game every time it got hard, you’d be robbing yourself of the sense of achievement when you finally prevail.

So rather than giving up on a game when it gets challenging, these days I give up on them when I sense that they’re not going to show me anything substantially new. An Assassin’s Creed game might be 80 hours long, but am I really seeing anything new after the 10th hour? Is this game going to surprise me? If I suspect not, unless I’m hugely enjoying myself, in the bin it goes. Meanwhile, I’ve stuck with Elden Ring for 50+ hours because almost every time I play it, I see something I haven’t seen before. Keza MacDonald, editor of the Guardian’s Pushing Buttons newsletter

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