The Must-Finish Reader
Dear Reader,
We might consider the title of today’s piece a working title. I couldn’t come up with a good title for the reader who must finish whatever book or article they’ve started, and so that hyphenated little bit is a placeholder for now. Admittedly, that’s a case for more than a few of these newsletters, but today’s especially strikes me so. Do let me know if you think of a better one.
The must-finish reader is a fairly simple one to define: once they’ve picked up something to read, they have to read the whole thing. Now, they might read other things alongside or interrupt the piece they’re reading to read something else for a moment—they are not strictly one-thing-at-a-time readers—but they absolutely must finish whatever it is that they have started. The incompleteness of a read will drive them to distraction.
I myself used to be such a reader. I am still mostly such a reader. Many is the twaddle of a book that I’ve pressed on with—and there are even more articles of that nature.
When you’re a must-finish reader, you’ve got to be quite discriminating about what sort of things you start reading. There’s a reason I still haven’t cracked War and Peace.
To this day, I can probably count on my ten fingers the number of books I’ve started and then stopped with no intention of returning. Christopher W. Tindale’s Philosophy of Argument and Audience Reception is one such book. It’s not a bad book, necessarily, but it was a typically dry academic book with a central thesis that I wasn’t finding persuasive no matter how much it droned on. Unpacking precisely why I found the book’s argument disagreeable would have necessitated not only twice the tedious pace I was already taking—I wasn’t merely scanning it—but also referencing another ten books at least. And since the book’s unpersuasive central argument could be readily handled by those more dexterous than I, I elected to spare myself the frustration of exploring the precise parameters of where it went wrong. And so I put down the book mid-read.
That I still readily recall putting that book down without finishing it—more than five years after the fact and with that book presently buried deep in a box—well, I guess that demonstrates just how haunting an unfinished read is for a must-finish reader.
Here’s to the reads that are happily finished,
Kreigh