Why do we abandon books halfway through?

Guilt may push us to finish a book – while e-readers make it only too easy to quit. 

Joseph Heller and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's titles are two of the books most often abandoned by readers, according to Goodreads.

When it comes to finishing books, there are two camps of readers – those who push themselves to complete even the most trying of tomes, and those who think life is “too short for bad books.”

Still, for most readers, there is an almost inexplicable guilt associated with abandoning a book halfway, an intriguing phenomenon explored in a recent Wall Street Journal article entitled “Why Leaving a Book Half-Read is So Hard.”

"[C]hoosing to terminate a relationship with a book prematurely remains strangely agonizing, a decision fraught with guilt,” writes the WSJ’s Heidi Mitchell.

What’s behind that guilt?

Finishing tasks – or books, or even meals – is a virtue ingrained in us from a young age. As children, we weren’t allowed to leave the table without finishing the food on our plate. And as young adults, we were instructed to finish the literature we were assigned in 9th-grade English, regardless of how dull or difficult we found it.

“It goes against how we're built,” Matthew Wilhelm, a clinical psychologist with Kaiser Permanente in Union City, Calif., told the Journal. “There is a tendency for us to perceive objects as 'finished' or 'whole' even though they may not be. This motivation is very powerful and helps to explain anxiety around unfinished activities.”

And while there may, in fact, be some benefits to sticking a task through to the end, research suggests that those who abandon books may actually be able to read more by freeing up time and mental energy. 

So why do we abandon books?

Besides obvious reasons like boredom, distraction, or frustration with a writer’s technique, e-readers have enabled us to drop books more quickly and easily.

“In the age of the e-reader, dropping a book has never been easier,” writes the Journal.

Rather than closing and re-shelving a book, a more public act that signals a certain amount of finality, readers using e-readers and tablets simply close one book and pull up another in seconds.

(If you’re interested, there are also reasons we don’t abandon books. One big one: book clubs, where the social pressure gets many more of us to the last page.)

According to Goodreads, about 20 percent of books read by the website’s members are abandoned. Here’s a list of Goodreads’ top ten most unfinished books: 

"Catch-22," by Joseph Heller

"One Hundred Years of Solitude," by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"Anna Karenina," by Leo Tolstoy

"A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, #1)," by George R.R. Martin

"Life of Pi," by Yann Martel

"Fifty Shades of Grey," by E.L. James

"Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell," by Susanna Clarke

"Eat, Pray, Love," by Elizabeth Gilbert

"The Casual Vacancy," by J.K. Rowling

"The Book Thief," by Markus Zusak

It's an interesting and eclectic list and it serves to make an additional point about diversity in reading styles: One man's must-read is another's why-bother.

Husna Haq is a Monitor correspondent.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Why do we abandon books halfway through?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/chapter-and-verse/2013/0605/Why-do-we-abandon-books-halfway-through
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe