Despite the headline and the lede, Michel Chaouli isn’t actually interrogating our reading habits. Instead, he’s interrogating the function of completion itself—the sense of “ending” that both marks and haunts any and every plot-driven narrative. “[T]he pressure to finish a book comes not from society nor from some neurotic impulse in my head,” he writes, “but from the work itself.” But that doesn’t mean he can’t poke at the all-too-common anxiety of deciding whether to put down a book you’ve already started.
Every word I read comes with a built-in off-ramp. At the first hint of trouble—say a description stretches a bit long—I stop to remind myself of the virtues of patience. At the second hint, fretfulness takes hold, and I count the pages to the next chapter break. I jump to the book’s end and discover that the last page is, still, 378. Every nonfinisher knows what happens next. My eyes fall on the spines of the stack of unread books next to my bed, and I idly wonder: Had I not planned on reading one of those first?
More picks about reading
The Missing Pages
“Sixty years after the Cultural Revolution began, a writer looks back to her childhood in Beijing during its peak, and the banned books that sustained her through the tumult.”
The Man Who Reads Books For a Living (One Every Two Days)
“Clarke Seicher is something much more specific and much rarer: a professional book reader who evaluates literature specifically for screen adaptation.”
Politics After Literacy
“Postliteracy won’t replace reason with madness, but it might give us madness of a new and different type.”
Thinking in the Margins
“What Oliver Sacks jotted down in the books he read.”
If You Quit Social Media, Will You Read More Books?
“Books are inefficient, and the internet is training us to expect optimized experiences.”
The Publishing Industry Has a Gambling Problem
“Companies keep betting on the next bestseller. Literature is poorer for it.”
