Most readers have a book with a bookmark stuck somewhere around page 80 in their homes. It’s been there for several months. Perhaps longer. The book is on the coffee table, the nightstand, or a corner of the shelf; it isn’t exactly being read, but it’s also not quite going back into the unread pile. The person who places it there experiences a low-grade twinge of something every time they pass it. It exists in a sort of purgatory. Not quite guilt. Not quite embarrassment. Something close to both.
This emotion is so prevalent that it practically merits its own term. However, its underlying premise—that finishing a book is a failure of some sort—deserves far more examination than it typically receives. The half-read book on the nightstand might not be a sign of an issue. It might be a sign of taste.
Reading culture is deeply rooted in the cult of completion. Annual book counts, Goodreads challenges, and the informal social flex of mentioning the number of books you’ve read all point in the same direction—forward, always forward, toward the final page. A reader who completes a book is perceived as a serious reader, while those who don’t are perceived as lacking self-control, easily sidetracked, and not fully dedicated to the task at hand. This is an incredibly bizarre perspective on what is ultimately a recreational activity. No one keeps track of the TV shows they haven’t finished. Nobody admits, clearly uncomfortable, that they began a podcast and then kind of lost interest in it around episode four.
Nancy Pearl, a Seattle librarian who rose to prominence as a public intellectual on reading, has a rule: give a book fifty pages. Put it down if, by then, it hasn’t captured your interest. She further modifies the calculation for readers over fifty: deduct your age from 100 to determine the book’s page count. Although the underlying logic isn’t entirely tongue-in-cheek, the arithmetic is. Time is limited. There is a limit to attention. There aren’t an endless number of books that merit both, and every hour spent diligently reading something that doesn’t work is an hour lost on something that might.
The point is made even more bluntly by Naval Ravikant, the venture capitalist who has publicly discussed his reading habits in a way that has obviously resonated—his remarks on the topic are continuously circulating online. He has stated that he views books as blogs. He takes a sample of them, goes through them at a pace that suits him, and stops when the value stops. The right relationship with literature is not typically described in this way by English teachers. But once they stop pretending to read and begin reading, that’s how many genuinely curious people actually read.
However, the argument that some books are worth not finishing precisely because doing so would ruin them is more difficult to make because it sounds almost perverse. After reading Proust’s In Search of Lost Time for five years, author Thu-Huong Ha was only roughly two-thirds of the way through. Her description of this behavior does not constitute an apology. She talks about working through 50 pages a month while sitting at a table—always the same table, always with a pen, never in bed, never on a train—and coming out of each session feeling as though she had been somewhere. The slowness wasn’t a coincidence. That was the idea. She seems to imply that reading Proust quickly would be akin to consuming a remarkable meal in four minutes. Technically feasible. incredibly wasteful.
It’s difficult to ignore how this strategy—viewing a book as a friend rather than a chore—directly contradicts how the majority of reading cultures currently operate. The book that is the talk of the town this week was also the talk of the town three weeks prior, and it will be replaced by another book in three more weeks. The cycle proceeds quickly. You have to read quickly to keep up with it. Additionally, reading quickly for a particular type of book is a contradiction in terms. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is not a book that encourages hurrying. Proust, Marilynne Robinson, and almost everything written prior to the twentieth century are also not. Attempting to read these books at the speed of a thriller is akin to trying to see a painting while jogging past it because they were written for a different pace of life.
Although they are different, the arguments for giving up on books and those for never finishing them are connected. Deciding that this specific book, despite its merits, is not for you, at least not right now, is an act of curation known as abandonment. This is not a sign of shame. It’s acceptable for a book that doesn’t work for you at age 34 to be perfect at age 45 or to never work at all. In any meaningful sense, stopping is not quitting. It’s simply being honest about where your focus is truly going. The accompanying guilt reveals more about the performance culture surrounding reading than it does about the reading itself.
Conversely, never finishing is a softer thing. It’s putting a book in a state of perpetual potential. Some books stay on nightstands for years because they are too good to rush, not because they are bad. That relationship—the book you keep going back to in bits and pieces, that you are constantly in the middle of, that takes up a specific area of your mind without ever being fully resolved—has merit. There is no end to reading. Admitting that the final page isn’t really the point is sometimes the most honest thing a reader can do.
Chloe Olliver is the Senior Editor at vclib.org, where she leads editorial coverage of literary criticism, political commentary, cultural analysis, and the evolving relationship between literature and public life across New York City and beyond. With a career spanning the intersection of literary journalism, political commentary, and educational publishing, Chloe brings both rigorous research discipline, in-depth knowledge, experience, and an accessible editorial voice to subjects that most readers find thought-provoking and culturally significant.