Two Hundred Pages In And Not Enjoying It

You have read the same page three evenings running.

Not because it is difficult. Because your eyes go over it and nothing goes in, and then you realize you have no idea what happened, and you go back to the top of the page, and the same thing happens.

That is the third night. And you know what it means and you have not said it to yourself in words yet.

You are not enjoying this book.

You have been about two hundred pages in for about a month. You are not going to finish it. And what has actually happened is that you have stopped reading altogether, because this book is sitting in the chair that reading occupies and you will not let anything else in until it is done.

So let me say the thing plainly, first, without a caveat anywhere near it.

Put it down.

You are allowed. That is the whole permission and I am not going to attach anything to it. There is no clause coming about how sometimes a difficult book repays persistence, and no suggestion that you give it fifty more pages, and no distinction between books that deserve to be abandoned and books that do not.

Put it down.

And I want to say why the caveat matters, because most people who tell you this add one, and the caveat is what makes the permission useless. If there is any condition attached, you will spend the evening deciding whether your book meets it, and deciding is the thing you have been unable to do for a month.

The world could not contain the books

There is a sentence at the very end of John's Gospel that is doing something quite unusual, and it settles this completely.

And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. Amen. (John 21:25, King James Version)

Even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.

That is the last verse of that Gospel, and look at what it is admitting.

John is telling you, in his closing sentence, that he has left things out. Not that he ran short of space, exactly, but that the material is beyond containing, and that what you have just read is a selection.

And there is no anxiety in it at all. He does not apologize for the incompleteness. He does not promise a second volume. He states that the whole is unfinishable, and then he writes Amen and stops.

That is a man closing a book while there is more, on purpose, without distress.

And here is what it settles for you. The idea that a thing must be completed to have been worth doing is not a principle you will find in that verse. The most important account ever written ends with its author noting that it is partial and then putting down his pen.

You are two hundred pages into something that has stopped giving you anything, and you have a model in scripture of somebody stopping mid-abundance and calling it finished because it was time to stop.

You are able to stop while there is more, and completing a thing has never once been what made it worth having done. John 21:25 ends the account by admitting it is partial and then simply stops, and the Holy Spirit is the one who releases somebody from a book that is holding a chair.

Finishing was never the point

Here is the practical part, and it is about where the obligation came from.

Nobody is waiting for your report.

That sounds obvious and it is worth saying out loud, because the way you are behaving suggests otherwise. There is no examination. Nobody will ask. The author is not aware of you. If you never open that book again, the total consequence in the world is that a book is not read.

So where does the obligation come from?

Mostly from school, where books were assigned and finishing was assessed, and where not finishing had a name and a consequence. Most adults are still operating a system installed at fifteen, and have never noticed that the assessment stopped about twenty years ago.

And partly from the money, if you bought it, which introduces a small accounting: I paid for this, so I should extract the value. But the money is gone either way. Reading two hundred more pages you do not enjoy does not recover it; it spends something else on top.

And here is the actual cost, which is the thing worth noticing. A book you will not finish and will not abandon does not sit neutrally on a table. It occupies the place where reading happens. Every evening you do not open it, you also do not open anything else, because opening something else would be an admission.

So the unfinished book is not costing you that book. It is costing you all the other ones, and it has been doing so for a month.

What an unfinished book costs is every other book, and finishing has never once been assessed by anybody since school. The written word closes an account while more remains and does not apologize, and the Spirit of God is the one who frees a chair that has been occupied for a month.

Put it down and start another tonight

So here is the assignment, and the second half is what makes it work.

Put down the book you are not enjoying and start another one tonight.

Physically move it. Off the table, out of the pile beside the bed, onto a shelf or into another room. Not the bin, and you do not have to give it away, and you may come back to it in four years and enjoy it enormously, which happens.

But move it, so the chair is empty.

And then start another one tonight, in the same evening, before you go to sleep.

That second half is not optional and it is the reason this works. If you only put it down, the evening ends with an abandonment, and abandonment is what you have been avoiding, and by tomorrow it will feel like a small failure that you will want to correct by going back to it.

If you put it down and immediately open something else, the evening does not end with a stopping. It ends with a starting, and what you will remember about tonight is that you began something.

Read one page of the new one. That is enough. You are not committing to the new book either; you are demonstrating to yourself that the chair was always available.

And you do not have to tell anybody, and you do not have to have a view about the book you put down. It is allowed to be a perfectly good book that you were not enjoying in September.

You are able to end the evening with a starting rather than a stopping, and putting one down has never once needed to be a verdict on it. John 21:25 closes with more remaining and writes Amen, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody opening something else the same night.