Obsessive Conclusion Disorder

At the Guardian , Toby Lichtig reveals how he is held hostage by the books he begins :

Are you a non-finisher? A literary tease who picks up books on street corners and then discards them on page 45 without so much as a follow-up text? Are your shelves a sea of protruding bookmarks? Alan Bissett’s are, and his entertaining recent blog drew attention to the perils of multi-stimuli multimedia intruding on our reading time and making it impossible to reach an end.

This is not my problem. As Bissett conceded, it’s not actually a question of there being no time to read, it’s a question of how you choose to spend your time – and I choose to spend a great deal of mine in the company of books. My problem is different. In fact, it’s a problem that makes me jealous of Bissett and his kind. Mine is more of a psychosis; a kind of reverse literary Stockholm syndrome in which, instead of forming an attachment to my captor, I am held hostage to the sources of my enmity.

It goes like this. I read the first few pages of a book, I can’t quite get into it, but I struggle on until I’m a third of the way through and after that I simply have to reach the final page. It’s not exclusive to novels. It’s not even just to find out what happens. I think it’s more compulsive than that: something to do with being assured that I’ve actually read the damn thing and not wasted my time on only some of it.

I confess that I’m what Lichtig would call a “non-finisher.” Perhaps its because I’m a relatively slow reader but I feel no compunction to finish a book that I feel is wasting my time. There are too many worthy tomes vying for my attention to waste even a moment reading a work that I realize lacks merit.

But I’ve also found that not all books that I start at a particular time should be finished right away. Often with nonfiction works (too often perhaps) I find that there are prerequisite books that should be tackled before wrestling with the ideas in a given volume. In other cases I find the right book at the wrong time. Setting the book aside for months or even years before returning to it makes the reading experience more valuable; I reencounter the book as a different person and with a fresh perspective.

What is your take on the completion of books? Assuming that the books are worthy of starting in the first place, is there an intellectual obligation to finish them? And is there differing standards for nonfiction and fiction?