I start about forty books a year and finish fewer than half. For a long time I reported only the finished ones, which made me a more impressive reader and a less honest one.
Finishing is a habit, not a virtue
The obligation to finish comes from school, where the book was an assignment and completion was the measurement. Nothing about adult reading preserves that logic, and yet most of us carry the guilt intact.
The cost is not wasted time on bad books. It is the good book you do not start because you are still dutifully grinding through a mediocre one, and the quiet lesson that reading is a thing to get through rather than a thing to do.
A book you abandoned at page sixty taught you where your interest ends. A book you finished out of duty taught you how to ignore that.
The three kinds of abandoned
Not all of them are the same, and separating them is most of the value in keeping the list.
- Wrong book: it is not good, or not good for me. Nothing to learn, close it, move on.
- Wrong time: genuinely good, genuinely not landing. These are worth noting, because about a third of them work on a second attempt years later.
- Wrong me: I lacked the background to read it. The only one that should produce a reading list rather than a shrug.
What I keep
A list with both columns, finished and not, and a word on which kind each abandonment was. It makes my reading year look worse and describes it much better.
The honest total this year is nineteen finished, twenty-two abandoned. The twenty-two is the interesting number and it is the one every reading app I have tried refuses to show me.
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