Is Leaving Books Unfinished Really a Bad Thing?
Why abandoning books could be smart investment in your growth. Learn how behavioral economics transforms our reading habits by showing that sometimes, letting go is the best choice.
⏱️ Reading Time ≈ 12 min
Today, I want to explore a question: is it wrong to abandon a book before finishing it?
Recently, I set aside a couple of books I had high hopes for. That got me thinking about why I read, the value of books, and certain cognitive biases that shape our perception of reading—like mental accounting (see Mental Accounting) and the sunk-cost fallacy (see Sunk-Cost Fallacy).
One of the most striking quotes I’ve come across as an avid reader is from Samuel Butler: “Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.” I find this image powerful because it highlights two essential aspects of reading. The first is curiosity: if we don’t feel the urge to set a book’s soul free, maybe it’s not even worth picking up. The second is the relationship between reader and book—because reading isn’t a passive act. It’s a pas de deux, a dialogue where the book isn’t just a static object but comes alive through the reader’s experience. That’s why the same book never quite feels the same to two different people. In a way, reading is like getting to know someone: the connection that forms depends as much on the book as it does on the person reading it (see the meaning of relationships [ITA]).
This brings me to the first question my recent experience made me reflect on: Why do we read? And, more specifically, why do I read?
I read books that are vastly different from one another, just as I enjoy meeting people with diverse personalities and immersing myself in a variety of experiences. Each book—like every encounter or experience—offers me a new perspective and contributes to my growth. Some books entertain me, others inform me, and some even shape the way I think.
I also read because I love the act of reading itself. The time I set aside for it almost every day is a moment of stillness—a chance to engage with an author, to reflect, to have an inner dialogue. No matter the book, I know I’m adding something: a piece to my personal or cultural growth, a spark for critical thinking, a way to expand the boundaries of my mind. As Borges said, we should strive to be able to think everything that can be thought.
Everyone reads for different reasons, but I wanted to lay out mine because they will be central to the argument that follows. If I had to distill them down to the essentials, I’d say they boil down to six: information, education, development, growth, joy, and entertainment. Of these, entertainment (in its broadest sense) and joy (the autotelic aspect of reading) are conditio sine qua non—without them, a book wouldn’t last long in my hands. The other four, however, can be seen as specific goals of reading. And just like that, I’ve already defined my mental accounts for reading.
A mental account is an emotional-cognitive allocation system we use to categorize objects and experiences. The theory of mental accounting (see Mental Accounting) originates in behavioral economics and helps explain, among other things, why people often make irrational financial decisions.
A classic example is an investor who keeps pouring money into a losing stock, convinced that with enough additional capital, they’ll at least recover part of their losses. This behavior depends on how they perceive their portfolio: if they see it as a single, unified whole (global mental account), they will assess gains and losses collectively and be more likely to cut unprofitable investments. However, if they mentally separate the portfolio into distinct sub-accounts (segmented mental account), each individual investment becomes an independent entity. In this case, a loss on a single stock registers as a negative account balance, creating emotional resistance to letting go. As a result, the investor is inclined to double down on that position to bring it back to positive, even when it’s not the most rational financial decision.
Mental accounting is closely tied to the concept of choice bracketing (see Choice Bracketing), which refers to how we group decisions. The first case described earlier is an example of broad choice bracketing: a wide aggregation of choices that leads to a more comprehensive view of the situation. The second case, on the other hand, falls under narrow choice bracketing, where options are segmented and evaluated individually, resulting in more fragmented and less optimized decisions overall.
At this point, we can introduce another key principle of behavioral economics: the Sunk-Cost Fallacy. A sunk cost is an expense that has already been incurred and cannot be recovered—rationally, it should not influence future decisions. Yet, in practice, we often factor it into our reasoning, falling into a systematic fallacy. Let’s go back to the misguided investor who applies narrow choice bracketing, treating each stock as a separate mental account. If a stock is losing value, they keep investing in it, hoping to recover their losses, rather than making a forward-looking decision based on actual prospects. This is the sunk-cost fallacy: the sunk cost is the capital already invested, and the mistake is considering it a relevant factor for the next decision. In reality, once a cost is unrecoverable, it should be ignored—continuing to invest just because money has already been spent is, quite simply, irrational.
The sunk-cost fallacy is, therefore, a cognitive short circuit that pushes us to treat irrecoverable costs as if the only way to justify them were to keep investing. In reality, this is a self-defense mechanism of our brain—it prefers to deceive us rather than force us to admit we made a mistake. Unsurprisingly, it does so to conserve energy (Principle of Cognitive Economy), avoiding the mental strain of critical reconsideration. In general, broad choice bracketing mitigates the impact of the sunk-cost fallacy because it allows us to evaluate decisions within a larger and more rational framework. In contrast, narrow choice bracketing isolates each decision into separate compartments, amplifying the weight of individual losses and making us more likely to persist in our mistakes.
Now that we have framed the concepts of mental accounting, choice bracketing, and the sunk-cost fallacy, we can return to books. Let’s try to translate our example: the investor becomes the reader, the stock becomes the book, the portfolio represents the library (understood as the collection of books read over a lifetime or a certain period), the money invested corresponds to the time already spent reading, and profitability reflects the reading objectives. From this perspective, a book that at a given moment does not meet our needs—because it does not align with the reasons why we read—takes on the same role as an unprofitable stock. Depending on how the mental account has been registered, the situation can either be perceived as an unacceptable failure or as an opportunity for growth and understanding. In the first case, the mental account is narrow, and each book is evaluated separately. This typically results in stubbornly pushing through a book with boredom and frustration, feeling as though you'd rather do anything else than read even one more word. Remember that reading happens through the relationship established between the book and the reader, right? Well, this would be like being handcuffed to the person you least tolerate on the face of the earth and being forced to talk to them for several dozen hours. In the second case, the mental account is broad and refers to the overall reading experience. Here, a single instance of "this book is not aligned with my expectations at this moment and is therefore abandoned" is recorded as a benefit for the global mental account. In essence, it is an opportunity for growth and enrichment—just as removing a single unprofitable stock improves an investment portfolio. Putting a book aside, then, is an act of service to my reading investment: it prevents me from lingering in an unproductive time investment (in terms of my reading goals) and creates both physical and mental space to accommodate a new book that might be far more enriching.
We can therefore conclude that if abandoning a book stems from a process of self-awareness, then that book has given us more value than one we forced ourselves to finish. If reading is a journey of understanding, then even a book left unfinished can enrich us just as much as one we loved until the last page.
In short: no, leaving a book unfinished is not an act of brute carelessness. Sometimes, letting go can be just as enriching as sticking to something (see Letting Go).
I’ve talked about books, but try broadening your perspective. Does this principle apply to other areas of life? Friendships? Work? These are just prompts—it’s up to you to find the connections.
Make the most of it! Until next time, S.
