Right now I’m currently reading 5 books.¹ As a result, I finish books really slowly, fall off of a book for weeks or months at a time, and my reading comprehension suffers. Another effect of my behavior that I’ve noticed is that because I don’t finish books often, I’m not reminded of how rewarding it is to finish a book. I’m more accustomed to the reward of getting and starting a new book than I am to finishing one. This just keeps getting worse and worse.

I’m hoping that embracing failure will help me prune my list down, which in turn should help me finish more books, faster. One way I’m embracing failure is listing books I’ve abandoned on my reading page as DNF (did not finish). I want to feel less ashamed of abandoning a book I’m not enjoying or even just not ready for right now.

I’m challenging myself to finish or abandon at least one book before the end of the month. I think I can finish The Death and Life of Great American Cities this month if I really try, but I’m having so much more fun reading Gotham. I’ll probably abandon The Devil in the White City.

The idea that I read too many books felt very obvious at the time of writing this, but I’ve since had a variety of different feelings on it. I want to include some quotes from Simon Sarris’ Reading Well.²

You should start many books and complete few. You should never feel beholden to completing them, there are simply too many worthwhile works to read.

When you have found a masterpiece, you should reread it just as you would revisit a beloved foreign land, or a faraway friend.

You should buy books on a whim, whenever possible, enough that you start to forget about them. You shouldn’t know the whole contents of your own shelves. If you create a home library it should act as one: It is there for you to discover and rediscover, to get lost in. Sometimes you can start or continue a book only when the mood is right, so it is good to have a storehouse ready. But you should also prune the unworthy. A good garden needs both.

This specifically has been something I’ve been trying to avoid, from a budget consciousness but also from a belief that I need to focus more on finishing books. I feel less confident in that now.

there is too great a fondness for non-fiction. I think this arises from a belief that superior knowledge of the world comes from non-fiction. This thought is attractive to people who build systems, but over-systematizing and seeing systems in everything can be a failure mode.

Please send me fiction recommendations, especially if we’re friends.