Novels I didn’t finish, and why that’s OK

There’s a quiet guilt attached to not finishing a book.  No longer on your TBR. Instead consigned to DNF. A sense that stopping is a kind of failure, or worse, a confession about the sort of reader you are. We talk easily about books we loved, books we devoured, books we raced through. We talk less about the ones we left behind, the bookmarks still sitting halfway through, the spines uncreased beyond a certain point.

For a long time, I treated unfinished books as a personal shortcoming. If I didn’t connect, I assumed the problem was attention, patience, or effort. That I hadn’t tried hard enough. But reading is not a moral exercise. It’s a relationship, and like most relationships, it’s shaped by timing, mood, expectation, and capacity.

Unfinished business: the allure of the incomplete novel

There’s something magnetic about the unfinished novel. These are books that gesture towards a whole, yet never quite arrive. They end mid-thought, mid-sentence, or mid-dream. 

And rather than leaving us cold, they pull us in. Think of Kafka’s The Castle, Sylvia Plath’s Double Exposure, or David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King. Each offers a kind of literary excavation site. We don’t simply read, we speculate, sift, and imagine.

Where to start with Martin Amis: The style, satire and the savage beauty of language

With writers you grew up reading, their departure leaves a space in your life that is as close to an ache as books and literature can get. That’s how I feel about Martin Amis.

Amis, who died in 2023 at the age of 73 from cancer, was one of Britain’s most distinctive and dazzling literary voices. The son of Kingsley Amis, author of Lucky Jim, he forged his own reputation as a bold stylist and razor-sharp satirist, chronicling the absurdities and moral disintegration of late 20th-century life with wit, intellect and a signature swagger.