Here are some books we hope to finish, and some we hope to never read again. “Harrow the Ninth” by Tamsyn Muir It pains me to say that I did not finish “Harrow the Ninth.” I was enamored with its ...

In the Boston Marathon, held on Oct. 11, 263 people did not finish out of the 15,734 who ran. The New York City Marathon had 25,390 entrants on Nov. 7, and 380 failed to finish.

Then you should absolutely finish the book for bitching fodder,” Maggie Q. Thompson, the news editor at The Austin Chronicle, told me. “The slump risk is a nonissue here.

For instance, in 2013 only 6% of athletes failed to finish Ironman Coeur d’Alene. There have been a handful of years with single-digit did-not-finish percentages.

But that means the decision of whether to finish a book you’re not enjoying is entirely yours—and, for some people, extremely fraught.