I Don’t Want to Finish This Book and You Can’t Make Me.

Do you give yourself permission to not finish a book? I do. Example I’m not proud of: I got a couple of hundred pages into the masterpiece, Anna Karenina. Sure, it was good. But it was one of those novels that have pages of description about a room and a piece of furniture. (Those novels were like the HGTV of the 1800s. A page on the wood carvings of a table. Full descriptors of each flower decoration on a bureau. Really, if I wanted this, I’d watch “Fixer Upper.”)

Then Tolstoy’s plot was taking turns into stuff about the proletariat. Finally, I was reading an ice skating scene that felt like it was going on for 50 pages and I said, “You know what? I’m outta here. I only have so many years left to live. I’m pretty sure I know how it ends anyhow.” I did the same thing this week with Madame Bovary. I need to tell myself, “At this point in your life, you just don’t want to read classic 19th century tragic forbidden love novels. And that’s okay. You’re still a good person.”

I used to always finish books because if someone asked, I wanted to say I read it without feeling like I was lying. But now, screw everyone.