Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace is the book I abandoned most spectacularly. I was 24, I bought it as a status object, I read 300 pages, I hated the tennis academy sections, I sold it to a used bookshop, and I told myself for a decade that I had done the mature thing by walking away from a bad-faith 1,000-page project.
What I did not consider until recently: the reasons I hated it at 24 — the dense structure, the endless footnotes, the emotional distance of the tennis characters — are the exact things I now enjoy in other novels. I abandoned it not because it was bad but because I was not the right reader yet. I was reading it to be the kind of person who reads it, which is the worst way to read any book.
I bought another copy last month. I am not going to force myself. I am going to keep it on the shelf and see if the mood arrives. If it does, I will report back. If it does not, that is also fine. This is one of the useful lessons of getting older: the books I abandoned at 24 are not permanently closed. Some of them are just waiting for me to be a different person.