There was a period in my life when finishing a book was a matter of pride. If I started a novel, I had to make it to the last page, even when reading started to feel like a chore.
Today it’s different.
Today I read for pleasure. Some readers read for fun, because reading can be fun, no matter how hard my middle school Italian teacher tried to make me hate it. We get to read whatever we want, without having to ask permission or apologize for it. We’re the ones brave enough to walk away from a book.
Because the DNF (did not finish) community exists. It moves quietly, in the shadows. It’s as if, once you start a book, you’re somehow obligated to finish it, even when you’re bored, or when it simply isn’t the right moment for that particular story.
When I stopped feeling guilty
I’ll admit I used to force myself all the way to the last page of a book, blood, sweat and tears, often yawning loudly through passages that felt as dark and endless as a cave with no way out. I felt like, somehow, giving up on a book would be a failure on my part. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the book. It was that I didn’t understand it. It wasn’t the book boring me: it was me, unable to focus. If it was there, on a bookstore shelf, that meant the story had value. I was the one who didn’t.
Then I realized I can’t love every single book, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a classic praised by the entire world or a piece of contemporary fiction covered in glowing quotes on the back cover, the kind with those neon-colored belly bands, stars, little stars, and glowing adjectives. You know exactly which books I’m talking about.
Officially, it was one of those very books that marked the turning point for me. I think I might be the only person who never finished The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, praised by every small-town book club and by my eighty-year-old neighbor, who still pines for the novels of Liala. Basically, a title everyone loved — except me. I closed it and took it straight back to the library. And no, I still haven’t even come close to picking up Skippy Dies.
A different kind of experience — though still a DNF in the end — happened with The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. Here we are, facing one of those infamous literary classics, the kind you’re never allowed to criticize. And yet, I couldn’t finish this hefty German brick, which I abandoned 200 pages from the end. Couldn’t I have just pushed through, at that point? No, because I was skipping pages and pages, just to see if anything would ever actually happen, beyond the endless debates on philosophy, ethics and life (which, as a reader, simply don’t interest me). Kind of like the long treatises on whaling and marine science in Moby Dick, which really aren’t for me either.
I’ve come to realize that every reader is different, and that’s perfectly fine. My taste doesn’t make me any better or worse than anyone else. And the same goes the other way around. It just makes me Gaia, an imperfect reader who reads a thousand genres without ever picking a single favorite. Someone who isn’t afraid to say: I have the right not to finish a book.
The time I spend reading is far too precious to waste it waiting for a book to start winning me over.
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