Nearly every serious reader’s apartment has a collection of books on the shelves that have an unmistakable quality: the books are a little too upright, the spines are uncreased, and bookmarks are either inserted at page thirty or page fifty or not at all. These books are crucial. The ones that people purchased because they felt obligated to, received as gifts because someone felt compelled to, or dutifully began before putting them down one evening and never picking them up again. As they sit there, a certain kind of silent guilt builds up. However, the readers who possess them are, in nearly every quantifiable way, more widely and deeply read than those who complete everything they begin.
The most ardent readers frequently give up on books, which is the quiet, open secret of the serious reading culture. Not the bad ones, which hardly ever get opened, but the classics, the winners of awards, and the books that are on every list of books that a knowledgeable person should have read. They are picked up with sincere intent, transported on trains, put on nightstands, and then discreetly put back on the shelf somewhere around page sixty or one hundred. The reader continues. Because the cultural mythology surrounding reading demands completion—that giving up on a book is a sign that you have failed it or yourself—no one discusses this in public.
The psychological mechanism underlying the majority of this guilt is the sunk cost fallacy. The book was expensive. The first fifty pages had already taken a lot of time. It was highly recommended by a friend. As the reader moves through chapters that are yielding diminishing returns—retained less and less, engaged with less and less, and increasingly endured rather than enjoyed—these facts feel like obligations. However, the value of what is left is unaffected by investments already made. This holds true for both financial and reading decisions, and readers who internalize this early on typically read significantly more and significantly better than those who do not.
Additionally, there is the identity dimension, which merits careful consideration.
Some books are kept on shelves because they convey something about their owner rather than because they are cherished or even read. The gathered Proust. Shakespeare with annotations. The owner finds the doorstop biography of a certain person less interesting than they had anticipated. These books are doing cultural work that has little to do with reading, such as creating a version of the reader’s self. The feeling that one should read Henry James or García Márquez is not the same as wanting to, and reading motivated by should rather than want usually results in the worst possible outcomes: bitterness toward literature itself, a gradual accumulation of associations between books and obligation, and ultimately the abandonment of the reading habit in its entirety rather than just one challenging book.
The most serious readers are aware that time is actually limited. The average person reads between 200 and 300 books in their lifetime, which may seem like a lot until you compare it to the number of books that actually exist and the number that could actually alter your perspective. Forcing yourself to spend three weeks on a canonical work that doesn’t engage you or provide the illumination or engagement that reading is meant to provide is three weeks wasted on something that would. Even though it doesn’t always feel that way at the time, the opportunity cost is real.
Additionally, it’s important to distinguish between giving up on a book and failing to derive value from it. The most proficient readers frequently approach dense nonfiction in the same manner that scholars approach primary sources: they identify the main point, take it in, and proceed after gaining a fundamental understanding. Completing the remaining 300 pages of a widely discussed work is a different activity than reading if the main idea is fully contained in the first sixty pages. This is completion for its own sake, which is a perfectly reasonable goal for some people and a waste of time for others. It takes practice to become proficient at determining which category you are in at any given time.
It’s difficult to ignore the fact that readers who give up on books the most frequently also tend to describe their reading experiences with the greatest enthusiasm—naming particular books and explaining why they love them, sticking with particular authors over and over again, and continuing to be genuinely excited about what they’re currently reading. There is a connection there that is most likely more profound than coincidence. There is a certain dullness of engagement when reading out of obligation. When people read out of genuine desire and guard that desire so fiercely that they avoid anything that threatens it, the result is something more akin to the reading life that they are genuinely attempting to have when they begin to accumulate books in the first place.
When the time comes, the valuable book on your shelf will still be there. Or by then, it won’t matter. In any case, you’ll most likely have another task to complete.
Chloe Olliver is 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.