Knowing When to Stop
How a historical novel about the hunt for Dracula's tomb may cure my people pleasing
It took me 28 days to finish Elizabeth Kostova’s 2005 debut novel, The Historian.
28 days is the length of a typical menstruation cycle. It’s the length of time it took for Cillian Murphy to awaken from a bicycle-accident-induced coma and realize entire societal collapse had occurred due to a zombie-like viral epidemic across the UK in 2002’s 28 Days Later.
I’m not sure what the relationship these two events have with one another, except that I cannot remember the last time a book took me an entire month to get through. It was not the first book I’ve struggled to finish, but as of writing, I can confirm: it will be the last.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about my mission to intentionally pursue newness in terms of my media and cultural consumption.
By my standards, The Historian is not newness. If you haven’t read the historical fiction-mystery, the story follows a young girl on the hunt for her missing father, who is in turn relaying the story of his own hunt for his missing thesis advisor, all of whom are actually hunting for Dracula’s tomb.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula is my favorite book. Of all time. Ever. (Also, I was a 14-year-old girl in the era of Twilight. There are dichotomies enough for young women to wade through, but why not make them stake – no pun intended – their claim in a cultural battle between sparkling emo Edward Cullen and hot-blooded Jacob Black?)
I thought I’d fly through The Historian. It has everything I like: A mystery where instead of hunting capers, the characters are just in libraries, conducting literary analysis. Vampires. Descriptions of stew.
Instead, the read was a complete slog.
I don’t want to take away from Kostova’s brilliant writing. It’s clear she has been just as inspired by Stoker’s original Gothic masterpiece as I was. Picking out the threads of OG Drac (like when our protagonist’s father returns completely white-haired a la Jonathan Harker on his escape from Castle Dracula, or the epistolary nature of the book) was real fan-service for a reader like me. Her characters are unique, true-to-form, emotionally balanced.
Honestly? The book was just too long, the process of unearthing the whereabouts of Dracula’s tomb repetitive. Look, given the nature of the fifteenth century, they were going to find Dracula in some monastery or another. I just didn’t need to be taken on a meandering adventure of the mind through four or five different East Bloc monasteries.
The Historian is 676 pages long. I started the book on January 17th, 2025 and finished Valentine’s Day, February 14th, 2025. I am not one to track my pages or WPM, but that comes to approximately 24 pages of reading per day.
And I’ve done the math to figure out how many books that leaves me if I read approximately 24 pages per day for the rest of my life. It’s not bad math. It’s not great math either. Regardless, the math doesn’t really matter: life is too short to read bad books.
In the reading world, there is an acronym for this. DNF. Did-Not-Finish. As in, I “did not finish” this book. Those who DNF call the practice liberating, freeing. And I think it has more meaning than simply deciding to shut the cover early.
If you offered a Venn Diagram to the Internet at Large, I think you would find the section capturing “readers” and “thought daughters” to be a circle, more or less. Many of the readerly friends I’ve met online share so much more than a love of Ottessa Moshfegh or hot tea; they are deeply introspective, empathetic people, and I’m sure more than a few would agree they struggle with conflict or people pleasing in their lives off-page.
There are very few situations in my life where my gut reaction is an immediate and resounding “no” – and when those situations have arisen, I am proud to report that I do trust my gut and opt out. Instead, choosing “yes” or “no” is rarely that simple. My struggle to say “no” is more like an on-going compromise with the world.
For example, if I’m asked to take on a new task at work, a quick-jot cost-benefit analysis runs through my head. Yes, I can tackle X, Y, Z, project, even if I have to rearrange some rest time, because I do have the capacity and capability, I want to be a team player and saying “yes” will help me advance in my career. If a friend asks for a favor, I say yes, because maybe I am free at that time, I can squeeze in lunch date and they might be going through a bit of a tough one.
The issue is that the nature of modern living makes me feel like I have to give an answer right then-and-there. A good psychologist friend of mine (a person who is both an excellent friend and excellent mental health professional) pointed this out as a big cognitive distortion of ours: flight-fight-or-freeze is supposed to physically protect us from a saber-tooth tiger. Our brains don’t work the right way to puzzle out things like cost-benefit analysis or say the most correct thing in an in-the-moment conflict — we’re designed to run, or freeze, or attack back. As such, we need to either step away and return later or pre-empt a difficult conversation / situation in order to give it a clear response with our full attention (and perhaps, intention).
I’m working on this. And for any Blotting Papers readers who are likewise working on this, may I suggest a single, simple phrase for you: let me think about that and come back.
And, in the wake of my painful read-through of The Historian, perhaps a second practice to help us better exercise our self-esteem: DNFing.
One of my favorite conversations to date goes live on my podcast, Broken Spine Social Club, this Tuesday and in it, media-guru Tori (aka @druzyveins) and I chat about the need to make ourselves uncomfortable in order to build new habits, or expose ourselves to new perspectives.
It’s a thought I want to come back to again, but I mention it here because in the instance of DNFing a book – what could be called an experience of closing oneself off – I am making myself uncomfortable. I’ve written extensively about wanting my “good girl gold star” and finishing a book is no different. I want to scrawl the title and author on my “Books Finished” page in my planner. I want to tally it up with all the rest of them at the end of the year.
But then I think of all the other books. Or all the other movies. Or TV shows. Or articles or podcasts or crafts or albums or conversations I could be reading / watching / listening to / completing / having. I think of all the things in the world I could be doing with focus and out of joy, instead of in struggle, out of…I don’t know. Canon? Completion?
Finding what I love kind of comes par for the course with my goal of spending my attention more intentionally this year. So, the promises instead I make to myself (and the one I hope you will all make with me) are these:
· I can be comfortable with being uncomfortable
· I do not need to sacrifice joy for uncomfortability
· If I don’t like it after 20 pages, into my local Little Free Library it goes
May your books be enjoyable and if not, may their covers close quickly.
Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this, maybe you’d like to…
FOLLOW me on Instagram
LISTEN to my bookish podcast, BROKEN SPINE SOCIAL CLUB
EXPLORE your options for bespoke content management, copy, and branding with my agency, PASTE COPY & CONTENT