The small pleasure of an unread page
On choosing to leave the last page of a book unread, sometimes, and what the small unfinishing does for the reading.
I have, for the last three years, sometimes left the last page of a book unread. Not the last chapter; just the last page. The book is otherwise read in full. The last page is left, by intention, unread.
This is a small private practice and it sounds strange to write about. I want to write about it anyway because it is one of the small contemplative gestures I have learned to do, and it has, in a quiet way, changed something in how I read.
Why I started
I had been reading a novel I loved very much. I was, by the second-to-last page, unwilling for the book to end. The world the writer had built was a world I had been living in for a week. The end of the book would be the end of the world. I closed the book one page early and put it on the shelf. I have not read the last page yet. The book has been on the shelf for three years.
I had thought this would feel like incompleteness. It does not. The book is, in my reading life, slightly more alive than the books I have fully finished. The world is still going. The last page is still ahead, and the world the writer made is still, slightly, open.
What I have noticed
Not every book wants this. Most books want to be finished. The last page is, for most books, the right ending and the book is honoured by being read to its proper close. But occasionally a book is so much loved that finishing it would be a small loss, and for those books — perhaps one in fifteen, in my reading — the unread last page is, for me, the right gesture.
The smaller thing
The unread page is a small choice not to consume. We are taught, by the long habits of reading, that the proper relationship to a book is completion. The unread page is a small refusal of completion in favour of something else — call it ongoingness, or holding, or simply the small choice to leave something open.
There are perhaps eight books on my shelves with unread last pages. I will probably never read the last pages of most of them. The books are, in their slight incompleteness, more present in my reading life than the books I have fully finished. The completion of the others has, in some way, made them less mine. The slight incompleteness of the eight has made them more.
I do not recommend this as a general practice. I do recommend trying it once, with a book you love. See what the unread page does to the book in your mind. See if the small refusal of the ending is, for that particular book, the right kind of honouring.