A colleague of mine refers to her “books graveyard”, where her unfinished books go to rest until that amorphous time in the future when they’ll be finished. No doubt many of you will empathise with that. But come, dear reader, and let me help you find the path to freedom. Let me help you reach what the fantasy romance author Elisabeth Wheatley calls Bookhalla, the bookish paradise.

Like so many things in life, it’s all about a matter of perspective. Instead of a graveyard, think of it as a collection. Umbert Eco would liken it to a medicine cabinet — and, after all, it’s better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it

Better still, remember you’re practicing the Japanese art of tsundoku (the word for the piles of books you’ve bought but not read). Importantly, for this article and indeed life in general, there’s no stigma attached to that word in Japanese. So you’re not a hoarder, it looks like you were a philosopher all along.

Life is short. Not necessarily nasty, brutish, and short like Thomas Hobbes wrote in the 1650s, but definitely, like James Joyce said, too short to read a bad book. So you have to know when to let it go and embrace the messy nature of things left uncompleted.

We say we’re more than the sum of our parts but we never think about how many of those parts are giving us random anxieties. And that’s especially true if, for whatever reason, you have developed (or been raised to have) the mindset that you have to finish what you started — the side effect being that you get angry or frustrated or depressed when you don’t.

So to beat the game take yourself off the board.

As somebody recovering from years of pushing myself to finish books, let me tell you what a liberating feeling it is to accept — and not just on an intellectual level — that if it’s not working out you can just set the thing aside and not spare it a second thought. Now apply that to aspects of other hobbies and think of how much inner peace you might recover

I abandoned James Joyce’s Ulysses a couple of weeks ago, having made it halfway through. 

I’d tried it years ago but never got into it, even though I kept it on my “need to read” list. A former colleague suggested I might like it better as an audiobook.

And I did, by the way. All the same, I only made it halfway through (the audiobook is about 27 hours long) and the fight went out of me. There’s a reason Chapters bookstore in Dublin has had a sign on one of its displays saying “Shoplifters will be made read Ulysses”. But, to paraphrase Pirates of the Caribbean: it’s like the Bible, you get credit for trying.

Pre-lockdown, I would have been annoyed with myself. Now I just rolled straight on to the next book, a collection of short stories inspired by HP Lovecraft which turned out to plumb new depths of mediocrity. So I let that one slide too. No regrets.

I urge you to look at that unread pile and think the same.

You’re a collector, a connoisseur, a patron of the arts on your way to Bookhalla. Life’s too short to think otherwise.

David O’Mahony is Irish Examiner assistant editor and a short story writer