ALL book lovers must have the same fear that I suffer from.

I look around our home, I visit a bookshop or I go to the library – and I am suddenly absolutely devastated when the realisation hits me once again that there is just no way that I am ever going to be able to read all of the books that I would ideally wish to.

I still can’t, however, stop myself from buying them, or borrowing them, piling up a precarious tower on my bedside table, and causing the shelves of my three big bookcases to bow dangerously.

And, even worse, I have two more large full bookcases at my parents’ home in Northern Ireland, waiting for me to come and finally collect their contents.

I hate to admit it, but one thing that I have started doing, because of my book backlog, is abandoning books (I almost find it painful to write those two words down beside each other).

I have decided that, from now on, I will force myself to give up on those which I am just not getting on with at all.

In the same way that I never walk out on a film or theatrical production, I am absolutely loathe to ever surrender and stop reading a book that I have started.

You just don’t know whether or not something is going to pick up, or if you are really close to the fantastic part or the bit when it will all finally makes sense or catch your attention.

I also tend to think back to the occasional tome which has had a slow start but which was definitely worth it in the end; personally, I found Captain Corelli’s Mandolin one novel where that was exactly the case.

But this sea change in my thinking happened recently, when I was slogging through a very chunky acclaimed novel. I reached page 260-odd and thought, I do not really care what happens in the next 600 pages of this book.

And what exactly would have been the point of me hanging on in there, really, when there are all those lovely unread titles taking up space here, there and everywhere around our home.

I might persist with a dud and thus waste precious time which could be spent on a diamond. So, I closed the cover of the big book – and promptly donated it to our local charity shop before I could get reader’s remorse and start ploughing through it again.

In parallel, I am also going to stop reading certain online reviews of books as, when I stupidly checked to see if anyone was reporting similar issues with the afore-mentioned novel, they were so full of praise that I felt as if I had missed something.

From now on, I’ll think what I think and that will be that!