In video game jargon, a “completionist” is a player who will continue playing a game until they have finished every level, found every secret, maximized their final score and have (essentially) consumed every single experience that a game has to offer.
Book Completionist
Last night, I was on Amazon looking for gifts for the coming holiday and I found that my purchase history back to 2004 was available. I started to look back to see what I purchased. It’s not a small number of books, so I copied them and then tried to remember which ones I read.
I’ve completed 34.0% of the books I purchased via Amazon in the last five years.
I’m not sure if that’s a good number, compared to all book buyers, but it’s much lower than I imagined it. I would have easily guessed I had completed 50% or more of the books…but no.
There’s a strong urge to go back and find all those unfinished books and get through them. In most cases, that would mean starting at the beginning because I can’t remember what I read in a book I bought and started in 2005.
I don’t know…if I started a book and put it down and forgot about it, is it worth picking back up? meh….
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I had the same thought this very afternoon as I brought home a new library book, knowing that there were three unfinished books on the table. I finally finished ‘Tropic of Cancer’ this summer to the detriment of any interest I had in reading more Miller. Is ‘The Master and Margarita’ really going to get any easier to read? Will gutting my way through ‘His Excellency: George Washington’ really honor the founding father or mine, who gave it to me? I think not, but the completionist in me wails.
I guess I’m a completionist then– It’s pretty rare for me to buy a book and not read it, and I nearly always finish a book once I’ve started it.
However, I guess the difference is that I don’t aspire to anything that involves a struggle. I know I’m never going to be willing to slog my way through an “classic” that no one really likes, or some philosophical treatise, so I only pick books that I think I’m going to enjoy.
So maybe that makes me a realist completionist. Or a completionist realist?
I try never to buy a book that I don’t read(excluding those romances I occasionaly buy for my wife or those I may buy for others), it may take me a few weeks or even months,if it’s a topic I am not enthused about,the same goes for library books, but since I actually put forth the effort to buy or borrow said book seems a pointless waste of said effort not to finish the thing.