Learning to be a quitter
Carl Sagan, Memento Mori, and the danger of a sunk cost fallacy
I did the math and I wish I hadn’t.
Not just because math makes my tummy hurt, but because the numbers are quite depressing. If I happen to make it to the age of 90, inshallah, and assuming I retain the faculties that permit me to read one book per week (my current average), I only have time to read 2500 more books in my lifetime.
Los Angeles Central library—the third largest in the nation—is home to over 2.8 million books. I won’t even get to read .1% of those books, and I don’t know if I’ll ever get over that.
“If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.”
-Carl Sagan, Cosmos
Life might be short or it might be an infinite incarnation on the wheel of time but either way, my experience of this one won’t last more than another 50 years if I’m lucky. And yet, last year I read fifteen books that I absolutely hated, and about as many more that I simply could have done without. This year, contrary to my 2024 reading intention to DNF (“did not finish,” abbr.) anything that didn’t arouse my bookish loins, I’ve already forced myself through four novels that I should have quit halfway through.
Despite our literary incompatibility, I white knuckled and gritted my teeth through page after loathsome page, cover to cover, for no other reason than I felt compelled to follow these characters to their end. Every single time I found myself 20, 50, 100 pages into a book that did not suit my fancy, I’d keep thinking:
Maybe it will get better (it didn’t)
I have to finish what I’ve started (a fallacy)
Maybe it will be worth it in the end (it wasn’t)
I have to see where this is going (nowhere)
Inevitably, upon reading the final sentence, I would suppress the urge to throw the book across the room (sometimes I gave in to it, and for that, I would like to apologize to my neighbor Hailee with whom I share a wall). It’s an affliction of sunk cost, and I have struggled to evade it for a lifetime thus far.
Quitting has never been a skill I’ve managed to hone, often to my own detriment. The most harrowing example of this is the miserable marriage that encompassed the first half of my thirties—some of my hottest, most lucrative, fertile years, wasted on somebody’s dusty son. I stayed and I stayed and I stayed and in the end I stayed three years longer than I should have. How tragic.
In retrospect, I’ve squandered years of my life doing things I didn’t want to do, with people I didn’t like, for reasons I’d convinced myself were necessary. Sometimes it was easier to stay than it was to leave; fear of the unknown can often outweigh a familiar discomfort. Most often, it was due to a stubborn and deleterious belief that anything other than finishing was failure. It took me a long time to realize that completion and fulfillment were not one in the same. I won’t berate myself for all the time I’ve lost because I’m not in the business of augmenting my own suffering, but I won’t justify it either; enough is enough.
Today, I chose to DNF a book that I was convinced I would love—a New York Times bestselling, Oprah’s Book Club, highly praised, Booker Prize nominated debut novel that I found overwritten, clunky, one dimensional, and dry. I didn’t want to abandon the characters and the story in which their lives unraveled—a story that frankly, deserved to be told. I wanted to see it all the way through, and in spite of my boredom, I tried. I tried and I tried and I tried and at the 40% mark I remembered the almost 2.8 million books at Central Library that I’ll never get the chance to read. I remembered all the stories I’ll never get to hear, all the characters I’ll never get to meet.
I pulled my bookmark out of page 113, walked to the library, and returned it to the book drop. Tonight, I’ll pull the next one from the stack of books on my nightstand, and hope for something better. Maybe I can learn to be a quitter, after all.
It’s the first of the month, which means the Prose Hoes Book Club is starting a new read! Join us for March as we read Against the Loveless World by renowned Palestinian American author, Susan Abulhawa.
Abulhawa was born in Kuwait to refugees of the 1967 War—a history that, sadly, many diaspora Palestinians share. Her novel’s main character, Nahr (which means river in Arabic) shares that backstory as well, as she navigates tragic circumstances, slowly becomes radicalized, and eventually is held as a political prisoner. While this is a work of fiction, it is based on the reality of the devastating displacement, apartheid, and genocide that has been occurring in Israeli occupied Palestine for decades.
Liberation is a collective struggle, and a crucial aspect of standing in solidarity with an oppressed people is hearing and amplifying their stories. We would love to have you join our inclusive, diverse group of readers as we explore Against the Loveless World together.