I have abandoned three books this month. A novel I had been meaning to read since 2019, a memoir that bored me halfway through, and a work of cultural history that started brilliantly and then disappeared inside its own footnotes. I feel no guilt about any of them. This took time to achieve.

There is a particular kind of reader — I was this reader for years — who treats every unfinished book as a small defeat. The half-read volume on the nightstand becomes an accusing object. You feel you owe the author something; that abandonment is a form of rudeness, or intellectual failure, or evidence of a depleted attention span.