Go Ahead and Quit
You know when it’s time to call it
I own almost 100 books. When I was isolated in my home, I built two bookshelves to hold the novels in my bedroom, educational and racial theory books in my office, and gardening encyclopedias scattered around the house. Two weeks ago, a friend asked me which of my books were display books, and I didn’t know what they meant. They explained that people kept books around to make them look a certain way. Introduced me to the concept of people buying sets of books in certain subjects-architecture, feminism, mysteries, mid-century cooking.
I thought it was utterly ridiculous.
When they asked if I’d read all the books I own, I told them all but three. Two are new purchases, and one was a gift I read six pages into and decided to donate. As a self-proclaimed book nerd, I don’t understand the concept of spending money on a book I’ll never read. It’s even more ludicrous to force myself to keep reading a book I’m not interested in if it’s not for school or work.
You can see this play out in ways, big and small, in most of our lives. We pride ourselves on finishing what we start, even and especially to our detriment. We keep the mountain bike we haven’t used in years because we spent so much money on the supplies. We keep watching the movie we hate because it’s already on. We’ve already…
