Somewhere in your home sits a copy of “Ulysses” or “Infinite Jest”—bookmark frozen around page 50, judging you from the shelf. You’re not alone. We’ve built an entire culture around pretending to have read books that most people abandon after the first chapter, creating a collective fiction more elaborate than anything Joyce ever wrote.

Admitting you haven’t finished these cultural monuments doesn’t make you intellectually inferior. It makes you one of the rare people willing to puncture the balloon of literary performance we’re all exhaustedly maintaining. Here are the books that unite us in our shared deception.

1. Infinite Jest (abandoned at the first footnote)

David Foster Wallace’s 1,079-page opus has become the ultimate intellectual accessory—prominently displayed, vaguely referenced, actually finished by twelve people worldwide. Most readers tackle the opening tennis academy section before discovering the footnotes have footnotes.

The completion rate rivals that of marathons and Mandarin fluency. Yet everyone nods knowingly at its mention, sharing a collective hallucination of comprehension. The real infinite jest? How we all pretend those 388 endnotes totally made sense.

2. Ulysses (defeated by that breakfast scene)

Joyce’s masterwork has terrorized readers since 1922. You bought it in college, full of ambition, then discovered following Leopold Bloom through Dublin required three guidebooks and possibly Joyce himself as tour guide.

Even Virginia Woolf found it diffuse and brackish. Most Joyce scholars haven’t finished it either—they’ve just perfected the art of faking it. That famous “Yes I said yes I will Yes” everyone quotes? It’s the last line. We’re basically people who only know the ending of “Freebird.”

3. War and Peace (lost in the Russian names)

Tolstoy gives you 600 characters including Natasha, Natasha’s cousin, and Other Natasha. By page 100, you need spreadsheet software to track who’s related to whom and why everyone has four names. The war parts drag, the peace parts drag differently, and suddenly you’re on Wikipedia at midnight.

The length isn’t even the issue—people binge entire TV series. But Tolstoy makes you work for every page, and most readers decide life’s too short for 19th-century Russian ballroom politics.

4. Moby-Dick (sunk by whale encyclopedia)

Melville spends chapters on whale biology, rope types, and the philosophical meaning of whiteness. The actual white whale appears around page 500. Most readers abandon ship during the cetacean anatomy lessons.

Everyone knows “Call me Ishmael”—it’s page one. The rest blurs into boats and obsession and maybe capitalism. We’ve collectively agreed that knowing the basic plot counts as reading all 135 chapters of marine biology.

5. The Silmarillion (buried in elvish genealogy)

Tolkien’s Middle-earth bible reads like mythology crossbred with a tax form. You need pronunciation guides, multiple maps, and immortal patience to track which Elf-lord begat which other Elf-lord.

People buy it to complete their Tolkien collection, flip through the creation myths, then return to the movies. Claiming you’ve read The Silmarillion is like claiming you’ve memorized the phone book—technically possible, deeply improbable.

6. A Brief History of Time (brief attempt, long confusion)

Hawking promised physics without equations. By chapter three, your brain resembles the event horizon he’s describing—nothing escapes, especially understanding.

Everyone owns this book as an intellectual participation trophy. Reading it revealed the conversation was in mathematical Greek. We display it prominently while secretly learning physics from YouTube videos called “Black Holes for Dummies.”

7. 1984 (spoiled by pop culture anyway)

Orwell’s dystopia suffers from being too referenced. Everyone knows Big Brother, Room 101, and “literally 1984” as a Twitter comeback. The plot arrives pre-absorbed through cultural osmosis.

The middle sections about revolutionary theory and books-within-books lose readers expecting more thriller, less manifesto. Somehow understanding doublethink as a concept counts as reading about it for 100 pages.

Final thoughts

Here’s the beautiful truth: not finishing these books is more honest than pretending you did. Literary culture created this weird prison where we perform intelligence through endurance reading, as if suffering through Finnegans Wake makes you smarter than genuinely enjoying a good thriller.

The radical act is admitting what you haven’t read. Say “I tried Ulysses and hated it” at a party and watch relief flood everyone’s faces. You’ve given permission to stop pretending, to acknowledge that accessibility isn’t intellectual failure, that life’s too short for books that feel like homework.

Your unfinished copy of Infinite Jest isn’t shameful—it’s proof you tried. That bookmark on page 47 is more honest than claiming you “loved every minute” of a definitely-fictional complete reading. The real infinite jest isn’t Wallace’s novel. It’s the elaborate performance we maintain pretending we finished it. And maybe the smartest thing any of us can do is admit we didn’t—and that we’re perfectly fine with that.

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