The Forge Guide to Reading Better

It’s Okay Not to Finish the Book

And other reading rules you’re better off breaking

Naben Ruthnum
Forge
Published in
5 min readJan 22, 2020

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Illustration: George(s)

InIn the last week of December, it seemed like half of the book-reading public was on social media feeding hashtags like #95books and #ReadingChallenge, ignoring their families to madly skim the last 10 books that would allow them to hit their Goodreads goal. While I respect goal-setting and accountability, watching so many people apply a sense of duty to something I enjoy as much as reading made me a bit sad.

Perhaps counterintuitively, I think the reason why I end up reading so much is that I don’t keep track. Eyeing my shelves and piles and iBooks history, I think I come pretty close to a hundred a year. Quite a bit more, if I include comics — and I certainly will, because they’re a key part of my reading life, which is a hodgepodge that also includes crime novels and political biographies, nature memoirs and contemporary fiction, and anything else that appeals to me as I discover it. I try to read the way I read as a kid: without rules and under no sense of obligation to anyone but myself, reaching for the books that I will enjoy the most. Learning happens to be a side effect, but it’s rarely my motivating goal.

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Naben Ruthnum
Forge
Writer for

Toronto based author of Curry: Eating, Reading and Race. Two thrillers (Your Life Is Mine / Find You In the Dark) as Nathan Ripley.