You Really Don’t Have to Finish Every Book You Start

We’ve all been there. Perhaps you were drawn in by a beautiful cover, hooked by the summary on the back of a paperback, or intrigued by the way a book was being discussed on Twitter. You read a great review; your favorite author was raving about a book; your group chat wouldn’t shut up about a twist. So you started the book. And you knew, whether immediately or 50 pages in, that it wasn’t for you, writes Molly Templeton on Tor.com. Please. Please just put down the book. There is a very simple reason why you shouldn’t force yourself to finish books, and it’s this: Life is short. Would you like to do the math on how many books you can read in your lifetime? Personally, I would not. Some things should be a mystery. But if you want to know, there’s a chart for that. There’s another simple, valid reason, too: There are so many other books you could read. In a review of Mark McGurl’s Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon (a book I will almost certainly never read), Parul Sehgal wrote, “In 2018, some 1.6 million books were reportedly self-published—all this on top of the tens of thousands released by traditional publishing houses.”