You Don't Have to Finish Your Books, Not Really
When You Should Power Through a Book and When You Should Quit
I'm not a fast reader—a fact that makes looking at my ever-increasing library all the more daunting. In 2022, I finished a mere 28 books. Now, on the surface, that might seem great, until you factor in how many books I bought that same year.
On Amazon alone, in 2022, I purchased 42 books. That makes my net progress for library completion that year a solid -14. My number of unfinished books at the end of the year became 14 books larger than when the year started!
If any of you are like me, you're also prone to buying more books than you can even finish each year. And for book lovers like us, the idea of finishing one's library continues to be a Sisyphean-level task.
However, a huge part of this (often) self-induced problem can be found in one word: "finish."
There's a stigma that we must finish every single book we own. It doesn't matter how long or short that book is, whether we're on the first book of a box set or struggling to power through the last, readers are constantly faced with the pressure to finish the books that continue to clog their shelves or bear the guilt of still having them on their TBR.
Let's assume that you finish, on average, one book every month. If you are like me (a 25-year-old man living in the United States), then, if you continue at this pace for the rest of your life, you're likely to finish 597 books by the end of your life, according to a recent National Center for Health Statistics study.1
All things considered, that's a rather grim picture to paint. Even assuming that you manage to find the time to finish 2-3 books per month, you're still looking at 1194 - 1791 books that you could potentially finish before you leave this realm of physical, mortal conundrums.2
But as prolific philosopher and writer, Lucius Annaeus Seneca once said “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it… we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it.”3
Do you really want to spend the time that you have left devoting so much of it to books you don't care for? Do you want the last hundred books you read to be ones you regret having finished?
Thankfully, I've found an answer to this dilemma that’ll help you filter out the books you probably shouldn't finish. Not only will I attempt to help you set aside the books you genuinely dislike, but I'll also give you a tip to increase your reading pace on the books you do enjoy.
Using these tips last year, I managed to finish 92 books, discarding plenty along the way that either weren't to my interest or simply not worth my time. I hope this article gives you the tools you need to chip away at your reading backlog faster than you can buy new books (optimistic, I know).
The hardest thing for any reader to know is when it's okay to drop a book. Knowing which books to put down and not pick back up is a critical skill to develop as an active reader. But how far into a book is far enough to know whether you should drop it. Nancy Pearl provides us with an objective framework to get us started.
Nancy Pearl’s rule of thumb is as follows:
100 - [YOUR CURRENT AGE] = # of Pages into a Book Where You Decide Whether or Not to Keep Reading4
So, for example, since I'm 25 years old, at roughly the 75-page mark, I should decide whether I should continue to read a book or drop it. If I've enjoyed what I've read so far and want to see what else it has to offer, I keep going. If the book has been losing my interest and I can't bring myself to pick it back up, I drop it and file it with my other dropped books.
The beauty of this rule is found both in its simplicity and its innate acknowledgment of time. As you get older, the benchmark to drop a book gets smaller and smaller. This rule acknowledges that as you get older, it gets more and more important to prioritize what you should and shouldn't spend your time reading. So today my benchmark is at page 75. Next year will be page 74. Next decade will be page 65.
I began using this rule last year and I've found it effective for helping me gauge how much value I'm receiving from a book in the introductory pages. Rob Fitzpatrick, in his guide Write Useful Books, talks about the importance of spoonfeeding the reader valuable content at frequent intervals. This helps drive the reader from page to page and keeps them engaged from start to conclusion. Using Pearl’s rule enables us to evaluate how regularly we’re enjoying what we read in the first pages of our books.
This rule can prove equally valuable for fiction as well as nonfiction. With novels, this rule will get you through the introductory chapters in most genres. By this time, you are likely to have engaged with several members of the main cast. You've gotten a sense of the setting and the main action of the plot is likely well on its way. In most fiction genres, if the story and characters are not grabbing you by this point, it's generally safe for you to set the book down and move on to something more likely to interest you.
There are a few fiction genres, namely science fiction and epic fantasy, which are prone to longer introductions and may take longer for readers to get to the core of them. In such cases, it is fine to either strictly cater to Pearl’s rule or continue knowing fully well that you can drop the book having read through a reasonable amount already.
When I ultimately drop a book, I leave a book dart on the last page I read. This way I’m able to easily reference how far into a book I got before I dropped it. Book darts slip comfortably onto the page in a way that is unobtrusive and makes the dropped books easy to store in a way that having a bookmark sticking out of them does not. They're one of the many ways I keep my library sleek and presentable, even for the books I opt to exclude from public display.
But let's say you've read beyond your reading benchmark. Maybe you're halfway through that novel you've been told to check out and you love it, but you're struggling to make the time to finish. Even when you do make time to sit down to read it, maybe your phone goes off and suddenly you're down the rabbit hole of social media and an endless sea of distractions is at your fingertips. How do we get through those books that we want to finish but are reading at a rate slower than we prefer?
One way is with audiobooks. Sometimes when I'm reading through a physical book that I'd like to finish before a certain date, I'll see if there's an audiobook available. I'll then read the book with the audiobook playing in the background.
For nonfiction books, I'll typically have the audiobook playing at a speed slightly faster than what I normally read at, with my finger scanning the pages. As I get more comfortable, I'll increase the speed. This practice helps me finish books twice as quickly, on average.
Even with fiction audiobooks playing at normal speed, I've found that having the audio accompaniment helped me finish more novels throughout the year than I normally would.
There's an endless number of books out there for all of us to enjoy. But there's only so many of them that we'll ever get to. Instead of dreading and bemoaning that fact, let's instead strive to make the best of the time that we do have.
These reading strategies have done a lot to increase the number of books I've been able to cover every year. Hopefully, by using them, you'll look at your reading list with less trepidation and much more pride. I think you'll find that the books that you've firmly set aside on principle will make those that you do finish feel that much more special.
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Sources:
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “FastStats: Life Expectancy.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2 May 2024, www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/life-expectancy.htm. Accessed 11 Oct. 2024.
Epictetus et al. How to Be a Stoic. Translated by Robert Dobbin et al., London, England, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Penguin Books, 2020.
Pearl, Nancy. “Nancy Pearl’s Rule of 50 for Dropping a Bad Book.” The Globe and Mail, 4 Feb. 2011, www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/nancy-pearls-rule-of-50-for-dropping-a-bad-book/article565170.
For the average US man, the average life expectancy is 74.8 years. For women, the average life expectancy is 80.2. Take the life expectancy for your gender subtract your current age and multiply that difference by the number of months (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).
Assuming you are the age of 25. To calculate for your age, refer to previous footnote.
(Epictetus et al. 31-32)
The original rule suggested making this decision at page 50, until Pearl made the above addendum once she approached her fifties (Pearl).