Brave.
Zoe has no idea what that looks like.
She knows she ought to call Will’s parents, but instead, she sits on the floor and starts to turn the pages of Anne of Green Gables.

So here is a contradiction for you: you can love books, and you can also decide not to finish a book.
Yes you can.
Books don't judge you.
Books can contain, and invoke, every feeling that there is. Books can bring you to rage or tears or happiness or all all three, in quick succession. Books can have such a profound effect on your emotions that they can change the course of your life. How many lawyers have been made by To Kill a Mockingbird, how many vets by the James Herriot books, how many teachers by Roald Dahl's Matilda?
This is how books work. They take what's in them, and what's in you, and the interface, more often than not, leads to picking up that book every chance you get. Sometimes the power is so great that you're up all night; sometimes you have to (and yes, I do mean have to) cancel a coffee date so you can get to the end.
And sometimes, there's a missing part of the chemistry. Or something in the book that just doesn't work for you. Or maybe the supposed romantic hero has the same name as the ex you will never quite recover from. It could be that the setting doesn't appeal or there's something in the way the characters relate to each other that doesn't fit into the receptor that you need it to fit into.
Sometimes, you do not care enough to want to read on.
This is something that books understand. That writers understand. That other readers understand. It's a fact of life. All foodies do not love bananas.
So if you haven't understood this yourself yet... take a moment. Take a breath. The next time you are fifty pages into something and rather than pick it up, you're scrolling through your phone... you can stop reading that particular story. You can donate or pass on that book, and you can start something else.
Reading should be a pleasure and a joy, an education and a promise, a release and an escape. The books you choose for yourself should never, ever feel like a punishment or a chore.

And there are books. Readers know that, when their heart hurts with loss or absence, then a book that they have read before can lessen the ache. Readers, faced with a new experience, find a book to help them navigate: a travel guide to a new city, say, but also a novel set there.
Readers give books to other readers, telling them, this will make you laugh, or, read this, please, so we can talk about it. Here you are, readers say, I don't know why but this made me think of you.
But what about when the pain is too generalised, or too acute, or too strange for us to self-diagnose? What happens when the new pain cannot be cured with the old medicine? Or when the problem seems too trivial to mention – we are not dying, we are not even coughing, we have no right to claim we are suffering – or too great to fix?
What if reading itself feels like a chore, or someone who has always found solace in books suddenly cannot find the energy or the empathy to so much as pick up a favourite paperback?
That's when a bookseller can help you.