Consider this the permission you’ve been waiting for: You can stop reading that book you hate.

Maybe you’ve been reading it the last few weeks—or months—but you’re having trouble finishing it because every time you pick it up it puts you to sleep after three paragraphs. Maybe the writing is too dense—or too simple. Maybe you find the main character obnoxious or the point of view is all wrong. Maybe it’s not a genre that interests you.

Maybe you just don’t like it.

At the end of the day, that’s all that really matters. The “why” is irrelevant. You don’t like it. Stop reading it.

And I get it. It can be hard enough admitting that we don’t like a book, let alone putting it down and walking away. Could be a leftover habit from high school, when we didn’t really get a say in what we read or whether we liked it, when we had to finish books. (Although, let’s be honest, anyone who says they never took advantage of SparkNotes or CliffsNotes is obviously lying.) Could be that we feel guilty for not liking it, for so clearly not enjoying someone’s work that we don’t even want to finish it. But we don’t seem to have the same problem turning off a movie or changing the channel to a different TV show.

So what is it about books?

For one thing, books require more of a time commitment than a two-hour movie or a 45-minute TV show, so there’s the mentality that if we don’t finish a book, all the time we already spent reading it was wasted. (The solution to this one, though, is actually a no-brainer. If you already feel like you’re wasting time, don’t waste any more.) And because books are more of a commitment, our reluctance to step away from them could be as easy to explain as the age-old adage: Nobody likes a quitter.

But here’s the thing—books shouldn’t be a commitment. Outside of reading for work or for school, reading shouldn’t be an accomplishment or a task or a chore. It sounds lame and cliché, but reading should be fun.

Should your opinion really change and you find yourself regretting the decision to move on from a book, you can always go back to it. But until then, leave books unfinished—guilt free—and read whatever the hell you want. Whatever genre, whatever style, whatever author you like, so long as it’s just that: something you like.