How often do you not finish a book? This is a hotly debated question among readers. Some of us have to stick it out, while others have a point when they will set it aside if the author or characters haven’t engaged them. I am trying to become someone who will let go of a book if I really don’t like it rather than act like there’s going to be a test later (there really isn’t now that school is over).

But this month I was faced with another question: how often do you not finish a book you like?

At the moment, it’s pretty often.

I’ve always had what I call a bedside table book. Often non-fiction, essays, or short stories that can be enjoyed when I just have a few minutes before bed and don’t want to get caught up in a mystery that will keep me up until 2:00 in the morning. These can take me a few months to finish even though I enjoy them, but until this month I haven’t ever had a bedside table stack (one that is definitely structurally unsound and might wake me up at 2:00 when it crashes to the floor) made up of non-fiction, short stories, a novel, a mystery, and some literary history.

There is a lot of writing online about the feeling you get when you finish a novel – the satisfaction, the slight sadness, the deep breath like you’ve just come up for air after being underwater a moment too long. I’ve always been a big believer in the term “book hangover” as a good way to describe the hazy re-entry to the real world after getting so tied up in a new one (especially with science fiction and fantasy). Finishing a non-fiction book often has its own set of emotions when you go back to the glossy block of photos placed in the middle of the text to re-examine them now that you’ve finished and know the stories linked to those faces or when peruse the bibliography in case you want to read more about a specific part of the book.

Those are all great emotions, but I was faced with a lot of stressful, and personal, situations these last few weeks and it seemed rather than the satisfaction of turning the final page I was craving the sound a book makes when the spine creaks for the first time.

So what does starting a book feel like? You open the page, you see the title page, the dedication, sometimes the chapter list. You feel the book – is it a heavy paperback with thick pages or one of these new mass market hardcovers so light they will barely weight you down? Are the margins big or too small and tight so you feel like you need a magnifying glass? Is the writer playing with paragraph structure? Are there short chapters or long ones? Long footnotes or an author who doesn’t want to clutter the bottom of the page and puts everything at the end? Is it a mystery that will offer you a big opening, a twisty-turney middle, and a big reveal? Is it a romance where you know that two people will fall in love before you even know who they are or why?

Sometimes those first pages come with high expectations – it’s a book you’ve been waiting for or an author you’ve loved before. You need to shake that off. Leave those expectations behind and actually dive into the real book now that it’s in your hands.  Sometimes those first pages come with no expectations –a beat up paperback by an author you’ve never heard of found on the sale shelf at your secondhand shop. Leave that lack of expectations behind too – it was written and edited and someone else read it and then a bookseller decided to put it back out into the reading world – so just get started.

We all hear about and talk about (and read about) what it means to finish a book. I’m sure I will finish all of these books and have plenty to say when they are done. But this month showed me just how much power starting a book can have as well. Especially when the world pushes you too much and you start to feel overwhelmed, pulling a book off the shelf and turning to the first page can be just what you needed to remind you of the possibilities we all have – even if today it’s just as a reader.