Month: March 2026

The Backlash Nobody Expected

Around the time Colleen Hoover’s “It Ends with Us” film tie-in edition hit bookstore tables in August 2024, something interesting started happening in the publishing world. Not the predictable thing. Not more people rushing to buy viral romance. Instead, a quiet counter-movement began rippling through the reading community, and the numbers are telling a story that contradicts every “reading is dying” article your boomer uncle forwards you.

By early 2025, the BookTok backlash had become impossible to ignore. Readers were openly expressing fatigue with algorithm-driven recommendations. Book communities started using phrases like “anti-algorithm” the way they might use “artisanal” to describe sourdough. Independent bookstore staff reported customers explicitly asking for recommendations that would never trend on social media. And here’s where it gets weird: literary fiction started gaining ground in ways it hadn’t in years.

I know what you’re thinking. BookTok drove roughly 35 percent of all adult fiction paperback sales in the US during 2024, according to data that just came out. That’s enormous. That’s the kind of market share that should make traditional literary publishers weep into their espressos. But the backlash that followed created something publishers weren’t expecting: genuine hunger for the opposite.

When Viral Becomes the Enemy

The thing about viral book culture is that it works too well. When millions of people watch the same emotional scenes spliced into fifteen-second videos, when you see the same titles everywhere, when your algorithm literally cannot recommend anything else to you, something breaks. The intimacy of reading gets replaced by a sense of obligation. Books stop feeling like personal discoveries and start feeling like homework assignments everyone’s doing together.

The “It Ends with Us” phenomenon amplified this feeling. Over 1.2 million copies of the film tie-in edition sold in its first month alone. That’s not just success. That’s saturation. That’s walking into every bookstore in America and seeing the same cover staring back at you from multiple displays. And for a lot of readers, especially younger ones who’d been the BookTok generation’s most enthusiastic adopters, it became a turning point.

What surprised me was the sophistication of this backlash. This wasn’t grumpy older readers gatekeeping from the sidelines. According to Pew Research Center: How Americans Read Books in 2025, 41 percent of BookTok readers aged 18 to 34 actively sought recommendations from independent bookstore staff specifically to avoid algorithm-driven picks. These are the people who built BookTok. They made it matter. And they’re deliberately choosing to step outside the system they created.

Literary Fiction Gets a Second Look

Here’s where the archaeology comes in. When readers started rejecting the algorithm, they didn’t just stop reading. They started digging backward through decades of backlist titles that had been quietly sitting in publisher warehouses, waiting for their moment. Penguin Random House reported a 22 percent jump in year-over-year backlist literary fiction sales in the third quarter of 2025. That’s not a blip. That’s a pattern.

The titles making this happen aren’t the obvious classics everyone pretends to have read in high school. These are the mid-career discoveries. The books that got overshadowed by their own era’s trending picks. The literary novels that were always good, never viral, and somehow even better now that we’re looking for them again. There’s something satisfying about watching a 2015 literary novel from a small press suddenly find readers in 2025. It suggests that literary merit doesn’t actually disappear just because nobody’s making TikToks about it.

This shift tells us something important about reading culture. We’ve been operating under the assumption that if a book isn’t trending, it doesn’t exist. But the appetite for “difficult” fiction and experimental work proved that wrong. According to NPD BookScan 2025 Fiction Trends Report, readers were actively looking for stories that don’t fit neatly into established genres or emotional beats. Complex narratives. Unreliable narrators. Books that ask questions instead of providing answers. Books that might not make you feel better when you finish them, but will definitely make you feel something.

Publishers Are Betting On Complexity

The most telling sign that this shift is real? The publishing industry itself is changing its behavior. Restless Books, a publisher focused on international and experimental work, announced a 40 percent increase in manuscript acquisitions for 2025 and 2026, citing renewed reader appetite for challenging fiction. That’s a publisher making long-term bets based on what they’re seeing in the market right now. They’re not guessing. They’re reading the signals.

When smaller publishers start acquiring more experimental work at higher rates, it means they’re sensing real demand. It means editors are getting submissions that feel different. It means the conversation around what’s publishable is actually shifting. We’re not going to wake up next year and suddenly have fewer books trending on BookTok. Algorithms aren’t going away. But the writers, editors, and publishers who spent the last few years getting squeezed out by viral formulas are being given room to breathe again.

This doesn’t mean literary fiction is “winning” against commercial fiction in some kind of cultural war. That framing was always wrong. What it means is that the market is rediscovering something it had forgotten: there’s room for both. Room for the books that make you cry at three in the morning and post about them immediately. Room for the books that sit with you quietly for weeks after you finish them, the ones you don’t quite know how to describe to other people because they don’t fit into easy emotional categories.

What This Actually Means For How We Read

The real victory here isn’t literary fiction “defeating” BookTok or younger readers suddenly abandoning social media recommendations. The victory is that the reading community is becoming more intentional. Readers are asking themselves what they actually want instead of passively consuming what the algorithm serves them. Some of them will still find BookTok picks that genuinely speak to them. Some will discover literary novels that change how they see the world. Most will read some of both, and that’s completely fine.

What matters is that the choice is becoming real again. Bookstore staff are having actual conversations with customers about taste and history and what makes a book work. Publishers are willing to take risks on stories that don’t fit the viral template. Young readers are old enough now to get tired of the same emotional beats, and curious enough to explore what else exists.

I’m genuinely interested in how this plays out over the next couple of years. Will this backlash sustain itself, or will it become another trend that gets absorbed back into the algorithm? How does the publishing industry balance these competing appetites without just creating a new set of gatekeepers? And most importantly, what are you reading right now that wouldn’t have found you a year ago? I’d love to know.

The Algorithm Changed Everything, and Nobody Was Ready

I need to tell you something that’s been sitting in my chest since September 2025, when the numbers started coming in. BookTok broke. Not in some metaphorical, “oh the internet is weird” way, but in a concrete, measurable, quantifiable way that nobody seems to be talking about seriously enough. TikTok’s algorithm update that year fundamentally rewired how content gets distributed on the platform, and book content took a particularly hard hit. The shift away from hashtag-driven discovery toward completion rates and watch-time metrics meant that the carefully curated, emotionally manipulative three-minute book reviews that built empires for authors like Colleen Hoover suddenly weren’t reaching the audiences they used to reach.

We’re talking about a 34% average drop in post reach across BookTok spaces, according to social analytics firm Sprout Social. That’s not a margin of error. That’s a cliff. Imagine walking into a bookstore where you could previously reach ten thousand people with a single post, and suddenly that same post reaches six thousand. For creators who built entire identities around being BookTok influencers, it was like waking up to find your megaphone had quietly been swapped out for a kazoo.

But here’s where it gets interesting. The machine broke, and in breaking, it revealed something true about how we actually discover books. Or at least, how we should be discovering them.

The Bestseller Formula That Everyone Bet On Started Failing

Colleen Hoover is not the villain of this story. I want to be clear about that because the internet loves a scapegoat, and Hoover’s unprecedented success with BookTok got her cast in that role by people who felt betrayed by the market. The truth is messier and more interesting. Her books genuinely resonated with millions of readers who felt seen by her storytelling, and the algorithm that used to amplify those voices worked exactly as designed: it created a feedback loop where more exposure meant more sales, which meant even more exposure. By 2023, her sales had crested at over 20 million copies, and for several years it seemed like the BookTok formula had cracked the code on contemporary publishing.

Then 2025 happened. Sales softened. Not catastrophically, but noticeably. And it wasn’t because Hoover’s books got worse or her readers stopped caring. It’s because the viral romance category became oversaturated. Publishers, seeing what worked, rushed to acquire and market more books that fit the mold. More traumatized heroines. More possessive love interests. More spicy scenes. More, more, more. But here’s what nobody wants to admit: infinite supply of the same thing has a way of crushing the novelty that made it feel essential in the first place.

The algorithm change just accelerated what was already starting to crack. When you can’t artificially boost your way to virality anymore, you’re left with the underlying foundation. And it turns out that foundation was thinner than we thought.

Where People Are Actually Finding Books Now

This is where my midnight text message energy kicks in because the data is actually beautiful if you squint at it the right way. According to a 2025 survey from the Pew Research Center reading and social media habits 2025, 38% of adults under 30 who bought a book in the past year cited a recommendation from a friend or family member as the top reason they made that purchase. Social media came in at 22%. Let me repeat that: personal recommendation more than doubled social media.

That’s not a bug in the algorithm. That’s a feature of actual human connection. It’s your best friend texting you at 11 PM saying “I just finished this book and I need you to read it because I need to talk about it with someone smart.” It’s your mom seeing you read something on the train and asking about it. It’s the person next to you in the coffee shop who caught sight of your cover and struck up a conversation. These moments don’t get tracked in social media metrics. No hashtags, no viral coefficients. Just people talking to people.

Independent bookstores, the places where physical human recommendations actually happen, saw a 12% decline in social media referred customer traffic in Q3 2025 compared to the year before, according to the American Booksellers Association. But here’s what matters: indie bookstores also reported that their total foot traffic remained relatively stable. People were still showing up. They were just finding out about those stores through different channels, through friends, through local community, through the kind of human trust no algorithm can manufacture.

Publishing Is Already Recalibrating (And It’s Messy)

Publishers felt the ground shift too. The Bookseller on publishing advance trends 2025 reported that advance deals for books specifically positioned as “BookTok-ready” dropped in average value by approximately 18% compared to what they were commanding at peak hype in 2023. That’s a massive correction for an industry built on betting big on viral potential.

The conversations I’ve been seeing in publishing circles have shifted from “how do we make this book go viral?” to “how do we write a book that will earn genuine recommendations?” Those might sound like the same question, but they’re not. One is about engineering a moment. The other is about creating something worth talking about. The latter is harder work, slower to build, and genuinely unpredictable. But it also seems to be holding up better in the long run.

We’re seeing publishers invest more in backlist titles, in building author brands across multiple books rather than betting everything on one viral hit, in physical events and real community building. Less profitable in the short term. More sustainable, though.

What This Actually Means for Readers Like Us

If you’re the type of reader who got swept up in BookTok recommendations and felt a little hollow when the books didn’t deliver on the hype, this might feel like vindication. You’re not wrong for feeling that disconnect. The algorithm was engineered to make certain books feel more urgent, more essential, more worth your time than they maybe objectively were. Some of those books were genuinely great. Others were just very efficiently marketed.

What’s happening now is a reset. Not a return to the old gatekeeping literary establishment, but a rebalancing toward the recommendations that actually matter. The ones that come from people who know you, who trust you, who have read widely enough to know what specifically fits your brain chemistry. Those recommendations were always more reliable. We’re just finally living in a world where the algorithm isn’t drowning them out.

The BookTok pipeline isn’t really broken. It’s just revealed as what it actually was: a tool for selling books, not a system for finding the right books. The real magic was never in the algorithm. It was always in what happens when you finish a book that wrecked you emotionally and you need to text someone at midnight who gets why it matters. That system is still working. It was always going to last.

What books have you discovered recently through actual human recommendation rather than social media? I’d genuinely love to know what people are finding when the algorithm isn’t shouting at them. Send me a message or drop a comment if you want to talk about it.

The Numbers That Should Make Us Pay Attention

I want to start with something that genuinely unsettled me when I first read it. In 2024, the American Library Association documented 1,247 unique titles challenged or banned across US schools and libraries. That’s the second-highest total the ALA has ever recorded. Second-highest. Not just concerning. Not just “we should keep an eye on this.” We’re talking about a number that only one other year in recorded history has surpassed, and we’re supposed to act like this is normal now.

What makes this year feel different to me, though, isn’t just the raw count. It’s the architecture underneath it. For the first time in the ALA’s tracking history, challenges originating from state-level legislation outnumbered those from individual parent complaints. Let that sink in. We’ve moved from concerned parents organizing at school board meetings to governments writing laws that preemptively remove books from shelves. The battlefield has fundamentally shifted, and most of us weren’t paying close enough attention to notice when it happened.

The American Library Association State of America’s Libraries 2025 report lays this out with meticulous clarity. What I find most striking is how this data contradicts the narrative we’ve been telling ourselves. We thought this was grassroots. We thought if we just educated people and had conversations, we could turn it around. But when your opponent is writing legislation, you’re not having a conversation anymore. You’re playing a different game entirely.

The Geography of Disappearance

Here’s something that made me angry in a way I didn’t expect: three states account for more than half of all school-level book bans enacted through formal policy during the 2024-2025 academic year. Texas, Florida, and Missouri. According to the PEN America Banned in the USA 2025 report, these three states represent 58 percent of the total. Fifty-eight percent. That’s not a statistical quirk. That’s a concentrated effort.

What bothers me most is what this means for kids in those states. It’s not just that they have less access to certain books. It’s that the message being sent is clear and deliberate: some stories are too dangerous for you to read. Some ideas are too powerful for you to encounter. Some narratives about people unlike your immediate community are considered threats. I keep thinking about the teenager in Austin or Jacksonville or St. Louis who might have recognized themselves in a character, who might have felt less alone, who now won’t get that chance.

The geographic concentration also reveals something uncomfortable about how we’re framing this issue nationally. When we talk about book bans as though they’re a scattered, nationwide phenomenon, we’re missing the precision of what’s actually happening. This isn’t random. It’s targeted and regionally concentrated, which means it’s also potentially replicable. Success in one state creates a blueprint for the next.

The Paradox of Attention: When Banning Books Makes People Read Them

Here’s where I want to sit with something genuinely complicated. Publishers Weekly reported in early 2026 that sales of the twenty most-banned books increased by an average of 41 percent compared to the year before their banning. Forty-one percent. So in a deeply frustrating twist of irony, the attempt to suppress these books has made more people seek them out and buy them. If you’re someone who believes in free access to information, you might initially think this is a small victory. See? The banning backfired. People want to read forbidden things.

Except it’s not that simple, and I think we do ourselves a disservice by treating it as good news. Yes, adults with disposable income and access to online retailers can now find these books more easily because they’ve become culturally visible through controversy. But the kids in under-resourced schools whose libraries have removed these titles? They’re not getting a 41 percent sales bump. They’re getting silence. The banned book bump is real, but it’s not evenly distributed. It’s a victory for readers with privilege and a loss for readers without it.

This is the mismatch that keeps me up at night. We celebrate that people are buying banned books while children in the states with the highest concentration of bans are losing access to them in the places that are supposed to be most democratic: their schools and public libraries. The sales data tells us something about market response to censorship. It tells us very little about whether that response is actually protecting the kids who need protection most.

What Institutional Resistance Looks Like Now

There’s a number that did make me feel something close to hope, even if it’s not quite enough. Over 4,500 libraries and bookshops participated in Banned Books Week 2025. That’s a 22 percent increase from the previous year. Libraries and booksellers are showing up. They’re resisting. They’re putting these books on display tables and saying publicly: we think you should read this.

What strikes me about this number is what it represents behaviorally. These aren’t passive participants. They’re institutions taking active steps to draw attention to censorship. In many cases, they’re doing this despite local pressure, despite political risk, despite the fact that their budgets are already stretched thin. The increase in participation suggests that people working in these spaces understand the urgency in a way that maybe the rest of us are only beginning to catch up to.

But I also want to be honest about what this number doesn’t do. Four thousand five hundred institutions is meaningful resistance, but it’s not structural change. It’s not legislative power. It’s not enough to counterbalance state-level legislation that’s specifically designed to make these books unavailable. Banned Books Week matters. But it’s a yearly moment of visibility in response to a year-round structural problem. The energy spent on that one week is real and valuable, but it’s not a substitute for systemic reform.

What We Do With What We Know

I keep thinking about what this all means for those of us who love books and believe in the power of reading. These aren’t abstract policy questions. They’re about who gets to decide what stories get told, to whom, and in which buildings. They’re about whether curiosity and imagination are treated as public goods worth protecting or as threats that need managing.

The data is sobering. The trend is clear. The shift from individual challenges to legislative bans is a fundamentally different kind of fight. We’re not going to organize our way out of this with enough concerned citizens at school board meetings, as important as that work is. We need to understand that this is now also a legislative and policy battle, and we need to show up for it with that same seriousness.

I’m genuinely curious what you’re seeing in your own communities right now. Have you noticed changes in your library or school? Have you encountered this personally? I think we need to be talking about this with the same passion we reserve for discussing books we love. Because in some very real ways, the fight for what books we get to read is the fight for what stories we get to tell ourselves about who we are and who we could become.

When Publishers Started Looking Backward

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about the publishing industry: it’s cyclical in ways that feel almost inevitable once you notice them. Right now, in 2026, something genuinely interesting is happening with books that were published thirty-plus years ago, and it’s not just nostalgia marketing wrapped in millennial pink packaging. It’s a genuine reckoning with what got left behind in the rush to find the Next Big Thing.

Last September, Canongate Books did something that felt quietly revolutionary. They launched the Canongate Rediscovered Imprint, a whole line dedicated to bringing back overlooked 1990s novels. Eight reissued books in that first wave, each one paired with a fresh introduction written by a contemporary author we actually care about. This wasn’t a dusty archival project dressed up in corporate speak. This was intentional curation. This was someone saying: we left gold on the table, and it’s time to go back for it.

The numbers back it up. According to the Association of American Publishers StatShot 2025, backlist titles now account for 62 percent of all print book sales in the United States. That’s up from 54 percent just six years ago. We’re not talking about a marginal trend. We’re talking about a fundamental shift in how people buy and read books.

A.L. Kennedy Gets Her Moment

Let me give you a specific example that made me sit up straight when I heard about it. A.L. Kennedy’s “So I Am Glad” got reissued by Canongate in October 2025. Within three weeks, it hit number four on the Scottish Book Trust bestseller chart. Three weeks. This is a book published in 1995. It’s a novel about a woman living in Glasgow who believes she’s living with Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac. It’s weird and intimate and funny and heartbreaking all at once. It’s exactly the kind of book that could have been lost to time, shelved away in remainder bins, remembered only by the people lucky enough to stumble across it.

But it wasn’t lost. Because someone decided it deserved a second life, with the right introduction, at the right moment. That’s the thing about timing in reading. Sometimes a book doesn’t need to be rewritten or updated or reimagined. It just needs to be put back into the world when readers are ready for it.

What made this particular reissue work, I think, is that it arrived with context and permission. The new introduction helped readers who hadn’t encountered Kennedy before understand what they were walking into. It gave longtime fans something to feel possessive about. And it created this shared experience across generations of readers, which is honestly what the best books do anyway.

Instagram Reels and Genuine Discovery

I know what you’re thinking. Instagram Reels and backlist reissues sound like a completely cynical combination. Nostalgia marketing feels cheap. But here’s where I’m going to push back gently on my own skepticism: yes, it’s marketing. It’s also working because it’s connecting books with people who might genuinely love them.

Waterstones reported a 31 percent sales uplift for classic reissues in 2025 compared to 2024. Yes, part of that was driven by calculated social media campaigns. But the reason those campaigns worked is because the books themselves are good. Because people saw a gorgeous cover and a book they’d never heard of, clicked, read the description, and thought: I want to read this. That’s not manipulation. That’s discovery.

The aesthetic of backlist reissues on Instagram matters, obviously. Beautiful cover design, intentional typography, the whole visual presentation. But what really matters is that the algorithm is now working in service of books that were otherwise invisible. A reader in Portland discovering a 1990s novel from Glasgow is genuinely possible now in a way it wasn’t before.

The Power of a Name on the Introduction Page

Here’s a stat that made me think about my own decision-making as a reader. A February 2026 survey from Books Are My Bag found that 67 percent of readers said a new introduction by a favorite living author would make them more likely to purchase a backlist reissue. Sixty-seven percent. That’s not a small number.

Think about what that means. For the majority of readers, that introduction, written by someone whose work we trust and admire, is genuinely influential. It’s a literary endorsement, sure. But it’s also something more interesting. It’s a conversation across decades. It’s one writer saying to another writer: this book matters. You should read this. Let me help you understand why.

The genius of the Canongate approach is that they understood this. Readers weren’t just looking for good books. They were looking for good books with guided entry points. We wanted to know why someone we admired thought a 1990s novel was worth our time in 2026. That’s not laziness. That’s actually smart reading.

Building Your Own Backlist Journey

Here’s what I keep thinking about as I watch this trend unfold: the backlist boom matters because it’s giving us permission to read backward. For so long, publishing pushed this narrative that new is always better, that next season’s releases matter more than last decade’s overlooked gems. But that’s not how reading actually works for most of us. We read in spirals. We circle back. We discover something, and it leads us to something else, and suddenly we’re exploring an entire era we barely knew about.

The 1990s novels being reissued right now represent real diversity of voices and styles. Not just literary fiction for the MFA crowd. Thrillers, character studies, experimental weird fiction. Books that remind us that good writing isn’t tied to a publication date.

If you’re looking to explore this yourself, approach it the way you’d approach any curated collection. Let the introductions guide you, but trust your own instincts about what sounds interesting. Read the early enthusiastic reviews. Follow the threads backward to see what else these reissued authors have written. Treat it like archaeological work, because that’s what it is.

What I love most about what’s happening right now is that it feels generous. Publishers and readers alike are saying: these stories still matter. These voices deserve to be heard again. There’s something genuinely hopeful in treating the past as a resource rather than just an archive. Tell me what you discover out there. I’m genuinely curious what books from thirty years ago are speaking to you right now.

I have a confession that makes me squirm a little: there’s a stack of bookmarks on my nightstand, each one marking the exact page where I surrendered. Page 127 of The Goldfinch. Page 89 of Normal People. Page 203 of Infinite Jest. These aren’t books I hated—that would be easier to explain. These are books that everyone else seems to love, books that won awards and sparked passionate discussions, books that left me feeling like I was missing some crucial reading gene.

It took me years to admit that sometimes the problem isn’t the book. Sometimes it’s just not the right book for me, at this moment, in this phase of my reading life. But that realization came only after I stopped treating DNF (did not finish) like a moral failing and started examining what actually happens when a reader and a book don’t click.

When Beautiful Writing Feels Like Homework

Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch should have been catnip for me. Art history, grief, a coming-of-age story wrapped in gorgeous prose—all things I typically devour. But somewhere around page 127, I realized I was reading it like medicine, dutifully turning pages because I felt I should appreciate it, not because I wanted to know what happened next. Tartt’s sentences are undeniably beautiful, each one crafted with the precision of a master painter, but they felt so deliberate, so aware of their own beauty, that they pulled me out of the story rather than deeper into it.

This happens more often than I care to admit with literary fiction that wins major prizes. The writing is objectively excellent, but it feels performative in a way that makes me hyperaware I’m reading rather than living in the story. It’s like being at a dinner party with someone who’s clearly rehearsed every anecdote. Impressive, yes. Engaging for three hours? Not so much.

I’ve learned to recognize this feeling now, that subtle shift from absorption to obligation. When I catch myself calculating how many pages I have left rather than wondering what comes next, it’s usually time to bow out gracefully.

The Intimacy Problem

Sally Rooney’s Normal People broke me in a different way. The book opens with Marianne and Connell in high school, navigating the particular cruelty of teenage social dynamics, and I was immediately transported back to my own adolescent awkwardness. But then something strange happened: the intimacy Rooney creates between her characters felt so raw, so unfiltered, that reading it began to feel like eavesdropping on someone’s therapy session.

Rooney has an uncanny ability to capture the internal monologue of young people figuring out love and sex and power. Every misunderstanding between Marianne and Connell rang true, every moment of miscommunication felt painfully familiar. But that’s exactly why I couldn’t continue. The emotional precision was so acute it made me uncomfortable, like looking directly into someone else’s diary without permission.

Sometimes books hit too close to home, and that’s not necessarily a flaw in the book. It might just mean you’re not ready for what that particular story is offering. I set Normal People aside at page 89, not because it wasn’t good, but because it was too good at excavating feelings I wasn’t prepared to examine.

When Ambition Overwhelms Experience

David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest represents a different kind of surrender entirely. I approached it with the dedication of someone training for a marathon, armed with online reading guides and a notebook for tracking characters. I wanted to love it. I wanted to be the kind of reader who could handle Wallace’s maximalist approach, who could surf the waves of his sentences without drowning in footnotes.

For 203 pages, I gamely followed Wallace’s labyrinthine plot threads and philosophical tangents. There were moments of genuine brilliance, passages that made me stop and reread them just for the pleasure of experiencing that perfect combination of intellect and emotion. But ultimately, I felt like I was working harder than Wallace was to make the book cohere. The impressive technical skill couldn’t compensate for what felt like a fundamental lack of trust in the reader’s ability to find meaning without constant intellectual fireworks.

This kind of ambitious literary fiction often feels like it’s trying to prove something rather than tell something. The difference is subtle but important. When a book is trying to prove its own importance, I can feel the effort, and it exhausts me as a reader.

The Pacing Mismatch

Sometimes the issue is purely mechanical. I abandoned Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad not because I disliked her experimental structure or interconnected storylines, but because the pacing felt completely at odds with what I needed from a book at that moment in my life. Egan jumps between characters and time periods with the confidence of someone who knows exactly where she’s going, but I found myself constantly reorienting, working to keep track of who was whom and when we were.

This isn’t a criticism of Egan’s technique—the book won a Pulitzer, and I can see why. But I was reading it during a particularly chaotic period, when I needed fiction to be a refuge rather than a puzzle to solve. The book demanded a kind of active engagement I simply couldn’t give it at the time.

Pacing is deeply personal. What feels like a satisfying slow burn to one reader might feel sluggish to another. What feels like an exciting pace to one person might feel frantic to someone else. There’s no objective “right” pace for a novel, only the pace that works for each individual reader in each individual moment.

Making Peace with Unfinished Business

I used to feel guilty about these abandoned books, as if I’d failed them somehow. But I’ve come to see DNF as a form of reader self-awareness. Life is short, and there are too many books that will grab me from page one and never let go to spend time struggling through ones that don’t.

That said, I keep those bookmarks. Sometimes what doesn’t work for you at twenty-five works perfectly at thirty-five. Sometimes you need to be in a different emotional place, or have different reading experience under your belt, or simply be in a different season of life. The Goldfinch might be perfect for me in ten years. Normal People might hit differently when I’m further from my own messy young adulthood.

The beauty of being a reader is that the conversation between you and a book is always evolving. Today’s DNF might be tomorrow’s life-changing read. What books have you set aside, and what do you think they were asking of you that you weren’t ready to give?