On Reading Books You Don't Finish

I have abandoned, at various stages of reading, Ulysses, The Recognitions, Infinite Jest, The Man Without Qualities, and Gravity's Rainbow. I have also abandoned hundreds of novels that nobody considers difficult: novels I simply stopped caring about, novels that bored me after fifty pages, novels I put down one evening and never picked up again. The difficult books I feel guilty about. The others I don't. This asymmetry is worth examining.

The cultural message around reading is clear: finishing is virtue; abandoning is failure. The "completionist" approach to reading — in which a book begun must be a book completed — is so widespread that it has a name (the "obligation to finish") and its violation requires justification. We talk about giving up on books as if we've given up on people.

What finishing actually signals

Finishing a book signals persistence. It does not necessarily signal engagement, understanding, or enjoyment. Many books are finished out of sunk cost — having started, the reader feels obligated to see it through — rather than genuine investment. These are the books that leave no impression: read to completion but not really read at all.

Nancy Pearl, the American librarian who popularised the "rule of 50" (abandon any book after 50 pages if you're not enjoying it), later revised this to suggest that readers over 50 should subtract their age from 100 — meaning that at 70, you need give any book only 30 pages. The logic is elegant: time is finite and books are not.

The case for abandonment

A book you abandon is not a book you've failed. It is a book that has given you something — even if that something is the information that this particular book is not for you at this particular moment. Books have seasons. Middlemarch at 22 and Middlemarch at 45 are different experiences of the same text. A book that defeated you at one age may be waiting for a later version of you.

The books I have abandoned and later returned to include Moby Dick (abandoned at 30, loved at 38), Anna Karenina (abandoned twice, then read in four days during a flu), and The Magic Mountain (still waiting for the right moment, which may or may not arrive). None of these abandonments were failures. They were postponements.

On the difficult books

The difficult books — Joyce, Pynchon, Gaddis — deserve a separate consideration. They are difficult because they demand more than ordinary reading: more attention, more tolerance for confusion, more willingness to be lost before being found. This is not a character flaw in the reader who stops. It is an honest response to a real difficulty.

I may never finish Ulysses. I have read enough of it to know what it is doing, and I have read enough secondary material to understand it more than I could from a single reading. This is a different relationship with a book than I would prefer to have, but it is not nothing. A book can matter to you without being finished.