Should one finish a book that you aren't enjoying? I often do. I think I do it out of guilt more than anything. What is stanger still to me, is that I will often pick up another book by the same author a year later and see if the next book is as bad. In some cases this has worked as I really like "Red Mars", "Green Mars", "Blue Mars" by Kim Stanley Robinson, while I loathed "The Years of Rice and Salt."
There are so many good books, I probably shouldn't finish books I hate. It's not that I think it will get better just around the corner. It's that I don't want to be a quitter. If it's really stinko, I'll skim. When it's over I'll know the character went to Prague, but I won't remember exactly why.
I am reminded of something I both heard and read Garrison Keillor say when he was talking about which poems he had included and excluded from his anthology "Good Poems."
His friend Allen Ginsburg, on the other hand, a good man, admirable in so may ways (expecially for Kaddish), was something of a gasbag, not big on rewriting, and reading his Collected Poems is like hiking across North Dakota. I stopped just beyond Fargo.
