Winnipeg Free Press | Newsletter
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When is it OK to give up on a book?
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Earlier this year, Goodreads, the social book-cataloguing website, made a new addition to its original Want to Read, Currently Reading and Read categories, which let users indicate the status of the books on their virtual shelves.
The Did Not Finish (DNF) category had long been called for readers who wanted an option for punting publications — either permanently or for another time — that didn’t meet their expectations, for whatever reason.
The addition reanimated a longstanding debate about whether it’s OK to quit reading a book partway through.
(Short answer: Duh. Do whatever you want. You have free will and but limited time on this Earth.)
In her New York Times newsletter this week, Melissa Kirsch weighed in on the question, saying, “I feel strongly that life’s too short to spend time on books one doesn’t like. But sometimes I wonder if the problem isn’t with the books but with me: impatient, seduced by novelty, impossible to satisfy.”
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In this age of ever-shortening attention spans, I can see her point, but for me, the category is mostly helpful in an administrative sense, clearing out books that are cluttering up my “currently reading” shelf by relegating them to a place where I still know they exist, but they don’t haunt me.
I don’t have a moral ruling on the DNF issue, but I’m a completist by nature and find it very difficult to abandon books, especially once I’ve put in some time with them.
I also have a competitive streak, even when the person I’m competing against is myself.
Regular Applause readers will know I set myself a (totally arbitrary) reading goal every year, so giving up on a novel more than halfway through requires some complicated mental math: will it give me more contentment to add this substandard work to my year-end total or will I be happier ditching it for a breezier read? Do I have a short li’l book I could sub in that would even out the equation? (I realize this is probably disordered thinking, but I am a slave to the dopamine rush of checking things off a list.)
But the older I get, the more aware I am of wasting time on things I’m not enjoying.
Last year, I picked up a Colleen Hoover novel while on vacation — it had been left on a shelf in our condo building where people leave books for the next guests — and not only did I not finish it, I literally hurled it into the sea.
Then, of course, I guiltily retrieved it and put it back on the shelf, bloated and salt-stained, for some other poor sucker to pick up.
After all, one woman’s DNF is another’s FTW, or something.
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Jill Wilson
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RECOMMENDED
NOVEL: Speaking of short l’il books, I recently finished Anne de Marcken’s debut novel It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over (128 pages) and wow. What a strange and beautiful piece of work it is.
I read it mostly in between reviewing fringe plays and a couple of times found myself welling up in Old Market Square.
It’s a literary post-apocalyptic quasi-zombie story about a woman — she has forgotten her real name — consumed by loss and unable to move on.
It’s profound and poetic, but not pretentious, and so darkly funny and visceral. I will be thinking about it for a long time.
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