I abandoned nineteen books last year. I know the number because I keep a list, and I keep the list precisely so that the number can accuse me, and it doesn’t, which is the point of this piece.
For most of my twenties I finished everything. This was not discipline. It was a superstition — a belief that a book is a contract, and that the part where it gets good is always thirty pages further on than the point at which you gave up. Sometimes this was true. The Radetzky March did not begin working on me until page ninety, and it then worked on me for the rest of my life. But I built a rule out of one exception, which is what superstition is.
The cost is not the hours
The argument against finishing is usually arithmetic: you have perhaps two thousand more books in you, so every bad one is a good one you didn’t read. I find this true and completely unmotivating. Nobody has ever put down a novel because of a spreadsheet.
The real cost is that reading a book you have stopped enjoying teaches you to read badly. You start skimming, and skimming is a habit, not a decision — it does not switch off when the next book is good. Three weeks of pushing through something inert and I read the first fifty pages of a genuinely fine novel at the same flat, sliding pace, and blame the novel.
I think this is the thing nobody says. The damage isn’t the time. It’s that you come out of it a worse reader, and you don’t notice, because the instrument you’d use to notice is the one that got blunted.
What I do now
I give a book fifty pages, unless it is translated, in which case eighty, because translated prose often takes longer to find its footing in English and I’ve been wrong about this too many times to be confident at fifty.
Then I ask one question, which I stole from a bookseller in Porto: do I want to know what happens, or do I want to have known? If it’s the second, I stop. Wanting to have finished is not an appetite. It’s an accounting entry.
The list of nineteen is on my desk. Four of them I will go back to. I can tell which four because I still think about them occasionally, which is more than I can say for several books I did finish and cannot now describe.
The books that got away are a better portrait of a reader than the books that got read. The ones you finished include everything you were merely dutiful about.
One caveat, and it is not small. This only works if you are reading for yourself. If you are reading to be in a conversation — a class, a book club, a friend who needs you to have read it — then finish it, badly if necessary, and forgive yourself the skimming. The conversation is the point and the book is the ticket. I don’t think there is anything wrong with that; I just think we should stop confusing it with reading.