Greg Bruce: the never-ending story on how not to finish a book

Will this book get finished? Photo / Getty Images

Greg Bruce seeks to understand an embarrassing predilection.

I didn't make it more than 10 pages into any of A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield or Oliver Twist, so was delighted to find myself several chapters into Great Expectations, engrossed, attached to, and engaged with, poor little whatshisname, and feeling good at the prospect of finally being able to say I'd read Dickens. That was a couple of years ago, and I can't say with any accuracy where that book is now.

I've read the first few pages of Ulysses, a few stories from Dubliners and all but the last few pages of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but only because I bought it for very little before a long train trip in the pre-mobile internet era. I've read some quotes from Finnegans Wake.

I've read a third to a half of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, half to three-quarters of One Hundred Years of Solitude, and an unremembered amount (none?) of Love in the Time of Cholera.

I was two-and-a-bit books into Knausgaard's admittedly enormous, life-denying six-book series My Struggle, when I acquired his tiny follow-up Autumn, the first of the Seasons quartet, "a personal encyclopedia of the world, written by a father to his unborn child." I've not read a word of his since.

I've read the Orwell canon but Nineteen Eighty-Four took me a year and I was most of the way through Animal Farm before I realised it wasn't a children's book.

I've read four chapters of The Brothers Karamazov, slightly less than a quarter of Catch 22, and half of Sophie's Choice. I've never started a Hemingway I wanted to finish, loathed The Catcher in the Rye and feel like I should have abandoned On The Road long before I did, which wasn't long after I'd begun. I can't even begin to say how many times I've opened a Jane Austen, gone to get something and never returned. I've read all of The Luminaries but only three-quarters of The Bone People.

I've started Tristram Shandy, several Raymond Chandlers, a number of Martin Amises and at least one Kingsley (Lucky Jim?). I borrowed Richard Ford's The Sportswriter from a friend because I thought it would help in a career sense, read the first 15 pages and never gave it back. I started a lesser Saul Bellow because it was cheap and I thought it would make me more attractive in a literary sense. This was around the time I was reading Don DeLillo's Underworld, which I would have finished if it was shorter.

Five years ago, my boss gave me several books by the great Australian non-fiction writer Helen Garner. That boss left the workplace two years ago but the books never have.

I've read the first four books in the saucy six-book Clan of the Cave Bear saga and most of the sex scenes in The Bronze Horseman. Considering I was Christian for several years while at high school, I've read very little of The Bible.

When I was in my late teens or early 20s, I cut a list of the 100 greatest novels out of the Herald and decided to read all of them. By the time I finished the first, A Clockwork Orange, I'd lost the list.

Greg Bruce has almost certainly not finished this many books. Photo / Getty Images

My self-narrative about my reading habits has traditionally been encapsulated by the story of the time I read The BFG, aged 8, in a single sitting, on the floor of our lounge, while my family watched mindless prime time TV. Now I come to interrogate the meaning of that story, it appears I may have misread it.

I never planned to be an incompletist and still refuse to label myself as such, even in the face of this overwhelming evidence. I didn't intend the last time I put these books down to be the last time I would put them down, but something else has always come up, then something else, and so on: youthful hangovers, struggles with inattention, deadlines, babies, diversions, depression, heartbreak, grief, the rise of the iPhone, Netflix, etc; all the usual stuff of life. And when all of that has passed, there is always the excitement and attraction of the new book, the hot book - the replacement of the familiar with the exciting, which in turns becomes familiar, and there is no thrill in going backwards.

This is not a comment on books; it's a comment on me. My overwhelming fear is that I'm not - and never will be - adequate, although it appears, from the evidence presented here, that the fear is not strong enough to motivate me to overcome it.

For my birthday last year, my wife bought me a Kindle-adjacent e-reader. Terrible idea. My reading history is easily accessed from the homepage and is a paean to my lack of commitment, my failure to finish, my intellectual inferiority: a coagulation of dashed hopes and good intentions gone bad. I'm currently 24 per cent of the way through Tolstoy's Childhood.