Ten Favorite Books I’ve Never Finished
(This list is by request: ten books I appreciate or even adore but have not read cover to cover—at least not yet. Most of these were designed to be dipped into and out of, but a few of them weren’t. I’ve arranged them in alphabetical order.)
The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa
The Complete Poems by Howard Nemerov
The Complete Short Stories by J. G. Ballard *
The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
Essays and Aphorisms by Arthur Schopenhauer
The Luminous Novel by Mario Levrero
Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
The Sublime Quran, translated into English by Laleh Bakhtiar
Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas by Clarice Lispector
2120 by George Wylesol
* A special case, since it’s one of my favorite books of all time, by one of my favorite writers, but it contains a story whose premise suggests you’ll be struck dead when you reach the end, and I refused to read the last paragraph.
— April 9, 2026