How I turned from book completist to DNF machine

There are two kinds of conversation I have about books these days. One of them centers on the ideas—"Did you read this?" or "Here is this incredible information I found."

The other one is focused on guilt.

Books, especially unfinished books, seem to create a lot of pressure and anxiety for some people. Unread tomes have this strange gravity of their own; little black holes that weigh heavy on the reader. People worry that the pile of books-to-be-read keeps building up, and stress out that they can't read them fast enough. The nightstand creaks under the load of everything backing up. The shelf laughs at them. They don’t have time, at least not right now, and it makes them feel bad.

All that's valid and true. It certainly doesn't help that social media is full of people who apparently have the ability to get through thousands of novels in double quick time, giving highlights of their last month's reading with numbers that run higher than I manage in a whole year.

But there was a realization I came to surprisingly late in my life that has made that pressure a lot lighter.

You don't have to finish a book to get what you need from it.

Sure, a great book is a tight and well-designed package of information (and I hope that all of the reads we pick are great) but the reality is that most are imperfect. They may struggle to keep your attention all the way through, or hit sticky or complicated places that slow your progress. And some of them are just bad.

Even when they’re close to perfect, however, that doesn't mean the conditions you’re reading them in are too. Your life has ups and downs. The attention they need may not match the attention you can give.

But if it's not serving you, then it's absolutely OK to put a book down. Come back to it later. Cast it to one side. It doesn't matter. You can give it, as the internet says these days, a DNF… and you do not have to feel guilty.

⌘

Like I said, it actually took me a long time to come to this conclusion. For a long time I had a "must finish" approach to books. Once I started, I wouldn't allow myself to stop. I would just keep on going until the thing was done.

Part of that came from work, where reading is often my job, and another part came from university, where reading was essentially my job. There were very few downsides to being a literature student, but one of the toughest parts was just the sheer volume of reading we were expected to do. I had to grind through a lot of books, usually 3-5 per week, and couldn't often get away without reading them since we would inevitably have to discuss the contents in a seminar or essay. (That doesn't mean I didn't try to avoid reading when life was too busy: there was a whole semester of Middle English literature where I barely picked up Chaucer and friends and ~just~ squeaked through.)

But part of it was also belief that most books contain some redeeming features—that even a terrible book can tell you something, even if that's about you or your own ideas rather than the intrinsic value of the information it contains.

I still think that's true, but I also realized that there are a lot of books out there and only so much time. For the last few years, I've read maybe 25 books each year. And I'm heading towards 50 years old. The number of books left in my life is no longer infinite; it's going to be a few more hundred most likely. And I don't want to waste time on things that aren't the right fit. I am now happy to put books down a few pages in, a few chapters in, or even 75% of the way through rather than get an unsatisfying speed read.

So here are my non-fiction DNFs for 2024 so far. Most of these are actually pretty good, they just didn't fit my mood. They may even come up in the future when I get round to finishing them and decide that they're worthy of a reading club pick.

The Great River, Bryce Upholt (great premise, but I got stuck about halfway through)
On Freedom, Timothy Snyder (didn't have time to finish it before picking this month's book as his last one, will go back to it soon)
Everything I Need I Get From You, Kaitlyn Tiffany (started strong, then I started losing interest)
There's Always This Year, Hanif Abdurraqib (nearly finished, but the prose is dense and takes a certain kind of mindset for me)
Be A Revolution, Ijeoma Oluo (enjoying it, but put it to one side for reasons I can't remember)
The Indispensable Right, Jonathan Turley (I liked the idea, didn't get into it)
The Importance of Being Educable, Leslie Valiant (just too academic, didn’t enjoy)

There are also a few more making slow progress, but I haven’t yet put them down officially—so I’ll hold those for now.

What about you?

Meanwhile, I'm hoping everyone who got a copy of On Tyranny Graphic Edition is enjoying it: October's Q&A session with illustrator Nora Krug is next Thursday October 24 at 11am Eastern/8am Pacific.

I'll send out reminders a day in advance, but this will be the last live Q&A for a while. After six months, I've realized that these live sessions aren't as important to you all as I expected: they're logistically complicated, and I know that people often feel the pressure to have read the book before they come along (DNF strikes again!)

I will still carry on interviewing authors where I can, but let's take that little bit of pressure off for now.

Onward

Bobbie