--- title: ""The war of art" and other books I did not finish reading" description: "You can read more good books if you skip the lousy ones." author: "Bartosz Mikulski" author_bio: "Principal AI Engineer & MLOps Architect. I bridge the gap between \"it works in a notebook\" and \"it works for 200 million users.\"" author_url: https://mikulskibartosz.name author_linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikulskibartosz/ author_github: https://github.com/mikulskibartosz canonical_url: https://mikulskibartosz.name/the-war-of-art-and-other-books-i-did-not-finish-reading --- Who should read “The war of art” by Steven Pressfield? It seems that the book is intended to be read by writers. I am not a writer (yet?), so is it for me? I decided to give it a try anyway because I wanted to try something different. This approach worked well when I read about the history of shipping containers. In the case of “The war of art,” trying something different failed me. I can’t blame the book. The book is not dull. It is quite well written. It consists of tons of short chapters. One page long chapters. If I didn’t like one of them, I could skip it and read the next one. I tried skipping chapters… repeatedly, for almost twenty pages. What was the problem? I am not the target group. I don’t write books. I don’t write short stories. Well, I did write a short story once, but I don’t do it anymore. I wonder whether I should feel bad about not finishing a book. On the one hand, I write about it. I have an opinion about a book I have not finished reading. For some people that is a mortal sin. If I told them, I would hear their scream: “How dear you?! You don’t know that book yet.” I used to agree with that point of view. On the other hand, a bad book is like a disgusting meal at a restaurant. When I eat something, and I don’t like its taste I just stop eating it. Nobody expects from you to wait until you finish eating before you have an opinion about a meal. I could force myself to read that book from the beginning to the end. I won’t do that. It would take me three times longer to finish it, and I would not remember anything I read. It would be just terrible time-management. You can read more good books if you skip the lousy ones.