We've all been there. You pick up a book, excited as ever to read it, only to find that it's a struggle to get through it.
Maybe the prose is clunky. Maybe the author's perspective is illogical. Maybe it's not what you were expecting. Maybe it's just plain ol' boring.
Whatever the reason, there's a point where you have to make an incredibly difficult decision as a reader– whether you're going to power through it to finish the book or discreetly put it back on your shelf and hope nobody asks you what you thought of it.
It's a crisis of conscience that has manifested itself online under the hashtag #DNF or Did Not Finish. For some readers, confessing their sins publicly in a Tweet (I refuse to call them "X posts" sans qualifiers) or a Goodreads review functions as a sort of confessional. For others, not finishing a book they started is a source of shame that they want to hide.
Regardless of where you fall on that spectrum, there's actually a lot to unpack when it comes to deciding whether or not to finish a book. For something so simple and mundane, the nuance involved is exhilarating! Let's dive in.
What Readers Have In Common With Ultramarathoners
Using DNF as an acronym for "did not finish" comes to literary circles by way of the racing world. While the acronym is used in a variety of races– from automotive racing to horse racing to cycling– it's most commonly associated with ultramarathons, that is, foot races exceeding 26.2 miles (42.195km).
In a truly fascinating academic article on the phenomenology of the DNF experience in racing, Tim Gorichanaz writes
No matter the formulation, ultrarunning is a grueling sport. In races of shorter distances, often the question is who comes in first, or what a particular person's finish time was. In ultramarathons, the bigger question is who will even finish. Even elite runners---the best prepared among us---do not take it for granted that they will complete any given event (Jurek 2012). In a typical race of 100 miles, the cardinal ultramarathon distance, anywhere from 20 to 50 percent of the runners drop out, failing to complete the distance.
He goes on to explain that within the running world, ultramarathoners experience a jarring sense of loss when they DNF a race that creates a shaken sense of identity as they reckon with their inability to cross the finish line and their perceived lost time that went into training and preparation.
Selfishly, I'll admit that I'm glad the sense of defeat we experience as readers when we DNF a book isn't nearly so intense. There have been several books I've sat aside without finishing, but at no point did I find myself questioning the meaning of my existence or having a crisis of identity because of it.
That's not to say it isn't frustrating or disappointing to walk away from a book– especially if it's one that your circle has hyped up or which you spent quite a bit of money on.
And yet, what I've come to realize– and the way I encourage clients to think about similar challenges– is that reading the book is not the ultramarathon, it's the practice. Here's what I mean.
The Cognitive Benefits of Reading Abound
Using Your Brain Protects Your Brain
Whether or not you like a book, reading it will benefit you. At a very practical level, frequent reading has been shown to prevent cognitive decline later in life. Because of how reading stimulates your brain, those who read multiple times per week are less likely to experience age-related memory loss, confusion, and loss of problem-solving capacity. There are even some small-sample studies that suggest it can also delay the onset or reduce the severity of Alzheimer's.
Reading can function as a form of meditation
When you get engrossed in a good book and can't put it down, you enter a flow state in which it's relatively simple to ignore distractions. Most of the time, however, that's not how we read.
It's increasingly uncommon that we're more than a few feet away from a device that's primed to capture our attention with buzzes, beeps, flashes, and pings. Kids, pets, family members, and neighbors can quickly heap an added layer of distraction on top of our technologically saturated free time.
As a result, most of us read like this: pick up a book, read a paragraph, see your phone screen light up, check your phone, re-read the paragraph, check if the person on the other end of the phone responded, read the next paragraph, get up to let your dog out... and on and on and on.
Even those of us who read voraciously as kids need to re-learn how to read and how to do so with intentionality.
To read with intention, you have to actively put in the effort required to focus– repeatedly making the decision to ignore your devices and non-urgent distractions, to assess each word you take in and not just scan over them passively, to piece together each sentence word-by-word instead of skimming.
This action of bringing your mind constantly back to a single activity is remarkably similar to meditation. The key difference is that traditional meditation invokes a mantra or the pursuit of an absence of thought, depending upon what school of thought you listen to, whereas focused reading seeks to keep your mind focused on the words before you without roaming to all of the to-do lists, notifications, and distractions that could be consuming your focus in its sted. In that sense, it can be a bit of a stepping stone toward meditation to first learn to get comfortable with the marriage of your own thoughts with an author's before getting comfortable with just your own.
Books that Are Difficult to Finish Often Expand Your Worldview
Consider some of the reasons you may consider not finishing a book.
- The content is too dense.
- The prose is too dry.
- The author's argument doesn't make sense, or the ideas are too complicated.
- The content isn't as relevant to your personal situation as you had expected.
- You unexpectedly disagree with the author in a significant or irreconcilable way.
In each of these cases– yes, even the case in which the book is dry and boring– the content you're consuming isn't aligned with your worldview. It doesn't conform to your tastes and perspective.
When it comes to content rooted in political, religious, or philosophical ideas, being confronted with this misalignment to your worldviews can be frustrating, or perhaps even angering. And by no means are we encouraging you to seek out the publications of political grifters for the sake of expanding your own worldview!
But, generally, when you encounter books that don't fit neatly within your worldview, it can be an eye-opening exercise to ask yourself if you understand where the author is coming from. On an empathetic level, are you able to make sense of what they are saying? Doing so cultivates empathy and improves your interpersonal communication skills; in today's workspace, being able to create understanding and build relationships with people whose worldviews differ from your own is a non-negotiable skill.
As for content that is overly complicated or that you don't understand right away (such as me when I take my bi-annual foray into reading books about statistics), the questions to ask yourself take on a different tone. Rather than asking if you can connect with the author on an empathetic level, ask yourself what part of their narrative isn't clicking– consider what concepts are the most foreign to you to create a pseudo-syllabus for yourself to fill in those knowledge gaps.
My personal favorite worldview misalignment is when an author has an unexpected or atypical approach to prose. Ornate or experimental prose can have the effect of making content impenetrable. Academic writing is a classic example of this. I'm often citing research from psychology or social science journals, and sometimes I absolutely hate it. Academia encourages a form of writing in which the author seeks to simultaneously demonstrate their expertise, use exceptionally precise language, and (if we're being honest) show off how smart they are for their peers in their field. The result is a block of text filled with passive voice and long words that rarely appear in common conversation. For this type of misalignment, I like to think about it like working a puzzle– an act of experimentation in which you attempt to use context clues to make sense of what is in front of you. If reading is exercise for your brain, this kind of reading is mental CrossFit.
Reading Books We Don't Like Forces Us to Acknowledge that Not Everything Is for Everybody. And That's a Good Thing.
At my workplace, we had a book club for employees in our Product and Engineering org. One of the books that we read was Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman.
Full transparency: I (secretly) had been the person to suggest the book for the book club. It had been on my to-read list for a long time, and I was eager to discuss it with my colleagues since time management at work, I believed, was one of the biggest shared challenges people in the Product Management role faced.
When I started reading the book, I quickly realized that the ideas Burkeman lays out for readers weren't tactical exercises in prioritization or time management in the traditional sense. His analysis was much more philosophical, bordering on spiritual. His underlying premise is that the average person only lives for roughly four thousand weeks, and it is with this sense of recognizing our own mortality and ultimate insignificance that he encourages looking at the world. To put it another way: we're all going to die and be little more than a blip in the grand scheme of human history, so why let something petty like a work assignment consume so much of your mental space and time?
Don't get me wrong. Four Thousand Weeks is a good book. It's one that I quite enjoyed. But, in our book club, I was in the minority. Like my original assumptions about the book, my colleagues expected to get a tactical primer about optimizing your time for output and productivity. Instead, they had to confront their own mortality, and several suggested that they only made it 50 to 60% through the book before putting it down and deciding it wasn't for them.
As part of that conversation, one colleague raised a question about the value of reading a nonfiction book that didn't directly address some challenge or question she had, or for which the topic wasn't pertinent to her interests. A fair point! But, the way I see it, if a book addresses something that isn't directly related to our challenges or questions, we can acknowledge that it addresses someone's challenges or questions. We have the beautiful opportunity before us to recognize that just because something doesn't apply to us now, it might be in the future, or it might be incredibly applicable to someone near us. As our situations and experiences evolve, so does our worldview, so there's a fairly decent chance that something we can't relate to now will be relatable in the future.
That's why there's something truly beautiful in being able to acknowledge and wrestle with an idea, accepting it to be factual or accurate but still not true for you in that moment.
So, When Should You Power Through a Rough Read and When Should You #DNF?
With all this reading for the sake or reading cheerleading, you may be thinking that we're going to lay down the law and say that you should finish every book you pick up.
Not quite.
By choosing to power through a book you don't like, there's an opportunity cost you have to take into consideration. If you have specific goals in mind for your reading and recognize early on in a book that it's not the right fit for you, there's no harm in swapping it out for a book that's a bit more aligned with your needs. Just pass the book that's not right for you on to someone who might more readily benefit from reading it!
It's primarily when you're reading for leisure, or when you've already made it past the halfway point, that we'd encourage sticking with a book and seeing it through to the end.
Ultimately, you're an adult (we're assuming... otherwise, what are you doing here? You get told you're an old soul, don't you?) and whether or not you read a book is your decision. There's no shame in whatever you choose. We just think reading is great and has its value regardless of whether or not you like the book you're reading.
