I have a graveyard of bookmarks at page forty.
Books I started in good faith and put down, not because they were bad, but because some Tuesday came when I didn't pick them back up, and then the not-picking-up quietly became its own habit. The bookmark stays where it is. The book moves to the lean by the bed. We both pretend it's temporary.
For years I felt I owed these books their endings. As if starting one were a contract, and stopping were a kind of rudeness to the author, who has no idea I exist.
I gave that up around the time I gave up on A Little Life.
I got past two hundred pages. It's well made, I could see that, I'm not arguing about the book. But somewhere in there the reading stopped feeling like reading and started feeling like something I was getting through, the way you get through a long difficult phone call. I kept going for a while out of a sense that the suffering must be the point and I was failing to be equal to it.
Then one night I closed it and thought, plainly, that I was allowed to not.
I put it on the shelf, spine out, finished as far as I'm concerned. I've never once regretted it. I think about that book more kindly now than I would have if I'd marched to the end resenting every page on principle.
Finishing isn't a virtue. It's just a thing that sometimes happens when a book and a reader keep wanting each other the whole way through. When they stop wanting each other, you're allowed to stop, and the only person who needs to grant the permission is you, sitting there at page two hundred at eleven at night, deciding you'd rather sleep.