Here is the situation. You’re on page 147. You’ve been on page 147 for three weeks. The book is sitting on your nightstand in that particular way books do when they know you’ve been avoiding them. You feel vaguely guilty every time you look at it. You pick it up, read two paragraphs, put it down again. You have done this at least six times. Nobody is having a good time.
I am here to help.
Not finishing a book is one of the more straightforward decisions available to a modern reader, and yet we have made it incredibly complicated. We have attached feelings to it. Invented a whole emotional vocabulary around “abandoning” a book, as if the book has somewhere else to be. It doesn’t. It will be fine. You, however, are on page 147 and life is short.
Let me walk you through this.
Step One: Diagnose the situation honestly
There is a difference between a book that’s slow to start and a book that simply isn’t for you. The distinction matters.
A slow starter makes you curious even when it’s being difficult. You’re slightly irritated, but you’re still asking questions. You want to know what happens, eventually, to these people.
A book that isn’t for you makes you feel nothing. Or worse: a low-grade dread every time you glance at it, and a running mental catalogue of every other book you could be reading right now instead.
If it’s the second one, that’s your diagnosis. Proceed to step two.
Step Two: Apply the rule
The rule is simple. I’m giving it to you now so you never have to have this internal negotiation again.
By 50 pages: Are you curious enough to keep going?
By 100 pages: Would you choose this over literally anything else?
By 25%: Would you feel relief if this book quietly disappeared from your life?
No, no, yes? Close it. Don’t negotiate with yourself. You already know.
Step Three: Know what kind of DNF you’re dealing with
Not all DNFs are created equal, and treating them like they are is how you end up feeling bad about something that doesn’t warrant it. There are two varieties.
The permanent DNF. This book is simply not for you. Maybe it never was. Maybe you picked it up for the idea of yourself you were trying to maintain at the time. Maybe you bought it because the cover was beautiful and you have apparently learned nothing from this habit. Whatever the reason: it’s not working, it’s never going to work, and that’s completely fine. Shelf it, donate it, move on. You are done.
The pause. This book got caught in the wrong season. Dense literary fiction when your brain is already running double shifts. An economics textbook, however charming, when what you actually need is a nap. (Edible Economics, I see you. I’ll come back. Maybe.) A 900-page anthology of Father Brown stories because it is nine hundred pages and some seasons you simply do not have that in you.
These books are not failures. They’re waiting for better conditions. Or they’re not, and you’ll eventually move them to the permanent pile. Both outcomes are acceptable and neither requires a formal announcement.
Step Four: Recognize the symptoms (so you catch it earlier next time)
You are allowed to stop when:
You’ve reread the same paragraph four times and still cannot tell me what it said.
You’re more aware of the page count than the story.
You’ve started bargaining. Maybe chapter twelve is where it gets good. Maybe if I push through this section I’ll care about these characters. Maybe. This is a red flag. Hope is not a reading strategy.
Reading it feels like homework from a course you didn’t sign up for and cannot withdraw from.
You opened it two weeks ago. You haven’t thought about it since.
Any one of these is sufficient. You don’t need all five.
Step Five: Handle the advanced cases
There’s a category that requires slightly more nuance: the book you respect completely but do not enjoy. These exist. They’re more common than anyone admits. You can recognize a book as important, well-crafted, and genuinely good literature while also having absolutely no desire to finish it. These two things can coexist. It’s not a contradiction. It’s just honesty about what you’re actually looking for right now, at this point in your life, with this much energy available.
I DNFed a book called Glad No Matter What. Take a moment with that. I put down a book whose entire thesis is finding gladness in all circumstances. The book did not need me to suffer through it to prove something. Neither did I. We have both survived.
I also DNFed a self-help memoir about group therapy. A book of inner excavation. A collection of poems about undressing. I’m not sure what I was working through in 2019 and 2020, but I was apparently working through it one abandoned book at a time.
Step Six: Pick up the next book immediately
This is the step everyone skips, which is why they feel bad afterward. The moment you close the DNF, open something else. Not something you think you should read. Something you actually want to read. Something that makes you want to keep going past a reasonable bedtime.
This is the whole point. DNFing isn’t the end of your reading life. It’s making room for the part that actually works.
The part few people get
Here’s what happens when you DNF more freely: you read more. You trust yourself more. You stop performing “being a reader” and start actually being one. The reading life you’ve been trying to have this whole time is sitting right on the other side of putting down the books that aren’t working.
Your TBR is long. Your evenings are not infinite. There are too many genuinely good books waiting for the space you’re currently giving to page 147.
Put it down.
You’re welcome.
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