Some books are not meant to be finished

I abandoned a novel at page ninety last month. Well reviewed, prize-listed, written by someone I admire. I’d been carrying it around for three weeks, reading four pages at a time, retaining almost nothing.

Then I put it on the shelf and picked up something else and felt so immediately, uncomplicatedly happy that I actually laughed at myself.

Three weeks. For a book nobody was making me read.

Where the guilt comes from

Some of it is school, obviously. You were assigned a text and tested on the whole of it, and finishing was the entire job. Nobody ever said: read forty pages and if it isn’t for you, we’ll find you something better. Completion was the metric because completion is easy to mark.

Some of it is money. You bought the thing. There’s a well-documented tendency to keep investing in something purely because you’ve already sunk cost into it, even when the sensible move is to walk away. Economists have a name for it; the rest of us have a shelf.

And some of it, if I’m honest, is vanity. A finished book is a small credential. It can be mentioned. An abandoned one suggests you weren’t up to it, or weren’t serious, and for anyone who has ever been quietly assumed to be less intelligent than they are, that stings in a way that’s disproportionate to the actual stakes.

I’ll admit that’s a factor for me. People make assumptions about fat women, and one of the less-discussed ones is a general downgrade in expected seriousness. I’ve been talked down to at enough dinner parties to have developed a reflex about it. So there was a period where I finished difficult books partly as evidence.

Reading as an argument you’re having with someone who isn’t in the room. Not a recipe for enjoyment.

The permission I gave myself, and where I got it

Nancy Pearl, an American librarian, proposed a rule I’ve found genuinely useful: give a book fifty pages, and if you’re over fifty, subtract your age from a hundred and read that many instead. The older you get, the less time you owe a book that isn’t working.

I love that the number goes down. There’s something clarifying about a rule that openly acknowledges you are going to die and the reading list is not getting shorter.

The arithmetic is bleak if you do it properly. A reasonably committed reader might manage forty or fifty books a year. Over the rest of my life that’s maybe two thousand, and there are considerably more than two thousand good books already written, before anyone publishes anything new tomorrow.

Every book I’m finishing out of obligation is displacing one I might have loved.

There’s a caveat I’d want to make properly here, because the confident version of this argument gets a bit smug.

Sometimes it’s simply the wrong week for it.

Sometimes a book is genuinely not good, or not good for you, and putting it down is simple discernment. But sometimes the book is excellent and you are tired, or distracted, or three weeks into something difficult in your own life, and a demanding novel is asking for a version of your attention that isn’t currently available.

I’ve picked things up years later and found them extraordinary, when the first attempt had been a slog. The book didn’t improve. I’d changed, or my circumstances had.

So I’ve stopped saying I didn’t like it and started saying it wasn’t working for me right now, which sounds like a hedge and isn’t. It leaves the door open. Some of the books I love most were books I failed at first.

Middlemarch took me three attempts. I’d have told you at twenty-four that it was tedious. I’d now put it near the top of anything I’ve read. The tedium was mine.

The shelf of unread books is not an accusation

There’s a Japanese word, tsundoku, for acquiring books and letting them pile up unread. It gets passed around online as a charming little confession, usually with a photograph of an artfully teetering stack.

I like the concept more than the sheepishness attached to it. The unread shelf isn’t a monument to failure. It’s a menu.

Umberto Eco apparently kept an enormous personal library and argued that the unread portion was the valuable part — the books you already know are finished with you, whereas the ones you haven’t opened are the ones still capable of changing something. Whether or not he was being entirely serious, it’s a better way to look at a bookshelf than as a to-do list you’re behind on.

I buy books faster than I read them and I’ve stopped apologising for it. Owning the possibility of a book is a genuine pleasure, distinct from reading it. Some of mine have been waiting eleven years. One of them will be exactly right in about four winters and I have no way of knowing which.

There’s also a question of what reading is for, which sounds pompous but turns out to be practical.

If it’s for information, then abandoning is obviously fine. You extract what you need and stop. Nobody feels guilty about not finishing a manual.

If it’s for pleasure, abandoning is even more obviously fine, since continuing to do something unpleasant for pleasure is a contradiction.

The only version where finishing genuinely matters is when the book is doing something structural that you can’t see from inside it. Some novels are deliberately uncomfortable for two hundred pages because the discomfort is the argument, and bailing means you get the discomfort without the point. I’ve been caught out by that. There’s a particular kind of book that only assembles itself in the last fifty pages, and if you leave early you’ll go around telling people it was aimless when it was, in fact, patient.

So I’ve developed a rough test. If I’m bored, I stop. If I’m uncomfortable, I keep going a while longer, because boredom and discomfort are not the same signal and I’ve learned to tell them apart. Boredom means nothing is being asked of me. Discomfort means something is.

It’s not foolproof. I’ve abandoned things I suspect were excellent and finished things that never justified themselves. But it’s a better instrument than the one I used to have, which was pure obligation applied uniformly.

What changed once I stopped

I read considerably more. That’s the straightforwardly practical outcome. When there’s no punishment attached to starting something, you start more things.

I also became a much better judge of what I actually enjoy, as opposed to what I think I ought to enjoy. It turns out I have limited appetite for a certain kind of contemporary literary novel where very little happens very beautifully. I like plot. I like a book that wants something from me. I spent years pretending otherwise and produced nothing but a slow reading year and a mild sense of fraudulence.

And I’ve become far more willing to reread. If completion isn’t the goal, then returning to something you already know is no longer a waste. I reread things constantly now, often just a chapter, the way you’d put on a song.

It also gets easier with practice, and the first few are the worst. I can still remember the physical resistance of closing a book at page sixty and putting it back on the shelf — an almost superstitious sense that I was going to be found out.

Nobody was ever going to find out. The examiner I’d been reading for had stopped taking an interest in me somewhere around my second year of university, and I’d carried on sitting the exam for another decade out of habit.

The novel from last month is still on the shelf. I haven’t given it away, which I think means something. I might get to it in five years and find it was waiting for a version of me who hadn’t arrived yet.

Or I won’t, and it’ll sit there, and that’s a perfectly ordinary thing for a book to do.

Nobody is marking this.