Books You Never Finished: Why That's Fine, According to Hao Xu-Lie

You've got books on your shelf you bought months ago and never finished. And if you're honest, that bothers you a little.

There's actually a name for that feeling: reading guilt. You were excited in the bookstore, you paid, and then life just kept going. Now that book sits there, quietly reminding you of an obligation you haven't met.

Hao Xu-Lie—a Taiwanese financial author and host of the Haovoice podcast—has a pretty liberating answer to this. In episode 680, his message is simple: not finishing a book is normal, and it's completely fine.

Here's his core argument. The purpose of reading isn't to turn all the pages. It's to find a connection between the book and your own life.

And that connection can show up in a lot of different ways. Maybe a concept suddenly clarifies something you already sensed—that "oh, so that's why I've always thought this way" moment. Maybe an idea makes you uncomfortable, because it flatly contradicts an assumption you'd been holding. Maybe it's a method you can put to use immediately. Or maybe it's a story that reminds you of something you actually lived through. The moment any of those things happens, the book has done its job. It doesn't matter whether you finished it.

So where does the guilt even come from? Hao's take is that it's a habit we dragged out of school. In school, you read a book front to back, and you were supposed to remember all of it—because there was going to be a test. That framework made total sense back then. Outside of school, it becomes a liability.

Think about the difference. School books are designed to march everyone through the same knowledge at the same pace. In that world, "finishing" is a reasonable standard. But the book you picked out in a bookstore? That was never designed for everyone. It's what you, at one specific point in your life, felt you needed. And what you needed might be on page thirty, or page one-twenty, or scattered across a couple of chapters. Page one-eighty might have nothing to do with your life right now. Forcing yourself through it just burns attention without building any real understanding.

Now, "just find the connection" sounds easy. But the connection Hao is talking about isn't shallow recognition—it's not "oh yeah, I've heard of this." It's closer to: this touches something real in my situation, and I need to stop and actually think about it.

And when that kind of connection hits, you usually do stop. You close the book, or you put down your phone. Something turns over in your mind. Maybe you start rethinking a decision you made, or you find a fresh angle on a problem you've been stuck on. And honestly? That is much harder to achieve than reading three hundred pages with nothing sticking.

This is the reframe I love: the density of your reading isn't about word count. It's about connection density. Some books you finish in a weekend, and a year later you remember absolutely nothing. Other books, you read three chapters, and one idea from those chapters shapes how you think for years.

If you're an engineer, this applies almost perfectly to technical books. Technical books tend to be dense and broad, but you didn't pick one up for fun—you grabbed it because of a specific problem. You're learning Kubernetes, or studying system design, or trying to finally understand some design pattern.

For that, reading front to back is usually the wrong strategy. What works better: scan the table of contents first, and find the chapters you have a connection to right now. Read those. When a question comes up, jump to the related section. And then keep the book within reach, so you can come back to it when you hit the next point in your life that needs it. Treat the book as a knowledge repository, not a task to complete. Once you do that, your whole relationship with it changes. You don't owe it anything. It's just sitting there, waiting for you to need it.

Hao has one more point I think is genuinely interesting—about buying books in the first place. Even a book you never finish reflects your state and your curiosity at that moment. And that's a meaningful signal in itself. So the better question isn't "why didn't I finish this?" It's "why did I think this book mattered to me back then?" The first question just manufactures guilt. The second one actually helps you understand yourself.

So let me leave you with the three things worth holding onto. First: the goal of reading is connection, not completion—the book has done its job the moment it links to something real in your life. Second: reading guilt is a leftover school habit, and the books you choose for yourself were never meant to be read cover to cover. And third: treat books as repositories you return to when you need them, not tasks you're failing to finish—and ask yourself why you were drawn to a book, not why you didn't complete it.

That book on your shelf isn't an unpaid debt. It's just waiting. And that's fine.