A shelf of books I will not finish
Twenty-two abandoned books, arranged by the reason I stopped. It is a more useful shelf than the other one.
Enova Studio
1 min read
There is a shelf behind my desk with twenty-two books on it that I have started and will not finish. I rearranged it last winter, not alphabetically or by subject, but by the reason I stopped.
It took an afternoon and it has been more useful than any reading list I have ever kept, because the categories turned out to say considerably more about me than about the books.
Eleven reasons, in descending order of how much they flatter me
- Finished in spirit. I got the argument by page ninety and the remaining two hundred pages are examples. Four books.
- Wrong season. Nothing wrong with it. I was not the person for it that month. Three books.
- Bought for the person I was pretending to be. Two books, both about economics.
- Beautiful and airless. Every sentence good, no reason to turn the page. Two books.
- Started at the wrong end. An essay collection I opened in the middle and never recovered from.
- Overtaken. Someone told me the ending. Two books.
- Too close to my own work. One book, which I will come back to when I have finished mine, and possibly not then.
- The library wanted it back. Two books, both of which I have never rebought.
- Genuinely bad. One book. Only one, which suggests I am not adventurous enough.
- Lost in a house move. One book, still notionally in progress since 2018.
- No reason I can reconstruct. Three books. This is the most honest category and the one I would most like to shrink.
(The barn conversion book is not on this shelf. I have finished it three times.)
Twenty-two books I will not finish, sorted by why, and the shelf tells me more about how I read than the forty a year ever did.
