The experience of abandoning a book halfway through that everyone around you has loved is uncomfortable in ways that go beyond the book itself. You're not just saying 'this isn't for me.' You're implicitly questioning the judgment of people you respect.

I've done this with several highly-regarded books and I've come to accept it as information. It tells me something about the difference between my reading and theirs — not which is better, but where the divergence is. When everyone I know loved The Secret History and I found it cold, that divergence told me something about my relationship to academic Gothic that I didn't previously know.

The books other people love that you don't are as informative as the ones you love that they don't. Both kinds of divergence are worth thinking about.