There is a particular guilt attached to the unfinished book, and I have decided it is misplaced.

It comes from school, where books were assignments and stopping halfway meant you had failed one. That framing survives long after the last exam. People will describe a book they disliked, could not follow, and resented for three weeks — and then say, slightly proudly, that they finished it.

Consider the actual transaction. You are trading hours of your finite attention for something you have already established you are not getting anything from. The sunk cost is the hundred pages behind you. The cost still to come is the two hundred in front. Only one of those is a decision you still get to make.

I abandoned four books this year. Two were badly written. One was good and I was the wrong reader for it, which is a distinction worth preserving. The fourth I put down at page sixty, picked up again in August, and read straight through — it had needed a different month, not a different reader.

The useful reframe came from a bookseller: the question is not 'is this book good' but 'is this the book for the next three hours of my life'. Those have different answers all the time.

What this does not license is the skim. Abandoning a book after proper attention is a judgement. Abandoning it after four pages because your phone buzzed is not a judgement, it is the absence of one, and I have been doing rather more of the second than the first.