Do you finish every book you start? Or do you
abandon books partway through? The Wall Street Journal recently explored the topic in an article, "Guilt Complex: Why Leaving a Book Half-Read is So Hard." Mary Wilkes Towner, adjunct
lecturer at GSLIS and librarian at the Urbana Free Library, was interviewed for the article and cast her vote for letting go of the guilt:
Librarians like Mary Wilkes Towner, an adjunct lecturer at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, always gives readers permission to stop whenever they want, to disentangle the act from childhood associations of reading as a task. "I have found that people in their 30s, they feel guilted into finishing—just the same way that they were told to eat everything on their plate," she says. "If you want to be culturally literate, skim. But we all have to give ourselves permission to quit."
Choosing the right books lets people dramatically increase the number of books they can read in a lifetime, she says.
Towner teaches the Adult Popular Literature class at GSLIS and her research concerns different formats and delivery methods for leisure reading and viewing.