How to Finish an English Book: Why Learners Stall and What Helps

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has 12 chapters. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has 24. At one chapter a day, Alice takes twelve days and Oz takes just over three weeks. Put that way, both are well within reach. Yet many learners have an English novel on the shelf with a bookmark somewhere in chapter three.

When the problem is that the book is too hard, the fix is a different book, and I wrote about that in Choosing English Books by Level and How to Do Extensive Reading in English. This post is about the other case: the level is fine, and the book stalls anyway. The reasons fall into a few types, and each type has its own fix.

Quitting and stalling are different things

The first thing to separate is quitting a book and stalling in one.

Extensive reading allows you to drop a book you are not enjoying and move on. That is quitting. You decided, you picked something else, and you are still reading.

Stalling is what happens when you never decided anything. You haven’t opened the book in days. Opening it again feels like a small chore. A few weeks go by. While a book is stalled you don’t move on to another one either.

So one approach is simple. When you notice a book has stalled, decide on the spot whether you are continuing or quitting. If you quit, take it off the pile. If you continue, try one of the fixes below.

Reason 1: you can’t see the end

In a long book it is hard to tell where a sensible stopping point is. If the progress bar seems stuck at 12%, motivation fades.

The fix is to make the unit smaller than the book. The chapter works well as a unit. A chapter ending is a break the author chose, so the story’s pause and your pause line up. If you stop by page count or by the clock, you often stop mid-scene, and the next time you open the book you have lost the thread.

Some older books have very long chapters. In that case, stop at a scene break inside the chapter, such as a blank line or a change of place.

Reason 2: a gap, and the story is gone

After a few days away, it is easy to forget who is who. With a large cast, or names you are not used to, this happens fast.

Two things help. First, when you come back, reread the last paragraph or the last page you read. Going back a little brings the story back with it. It takes a few minutes, and skipping it usually means pushing on confused and stalling again.

Second, keep a short list of characters inside the cover or in a notebook. A name and a few words is enough, for example “Jo: second sister, wants to write.”

Reason 3: the opening is the heaviest part

The first chapters of a novel are often slow, introducing people and places before anything happens. This is especially true of nineteenth-century books. For a learner, the opening is also where most of the unknown words appear at once.

One fix is to know the plot in advance. Most classics have a summary on Wikipedia. If you don’t want the ending, read only the part covering the first few chapters. Choosing a story you already know from a film or a simplified version works the same way. It might feel like a waste for a book in your own language, but in a foreign language, knowing the plot is a real help.

Another fix is to read along with audio. LibriVox offers free recordings of public domain books read by volunteers, and many classics are there. Listening while your eyes follow the text carries you through a slow opening at a steady pace.

Reason 4: trying to understand everything

If you try not to miss a single word, each page takes a long time, the story barely moves, and it gets harder to want to continue.

I covered this in How to Do Extensive Reading in English, so I will add only one point here. If you are following the story, you have read the paragraph. When you know who did what, you can move on even with a few words you don’t know.

A daily routine for finishing

Putting this together, one routine looks like this:

• Use the chapter as the unit. Split very long chapters at a scene break.
• Start each session by rereading the last paragraph from last time.
• Keep the character list to one sheet.
• When you notice a book has stalled, decide whether to continue or quit.

You can also keep a record of the books you finish, just the title and the date. Finishing the first book makes the second one a little easier, because having finished one helps you get past the next book’s opening.

Finishing a book in ABC George

I make ABC George, a free reading app for iPhone and iPad for reading whole English books from Project Gutenberg.

The app handles the chapter part for you. Books are divided into chapters, and long chapters are broken into readable lengths. The chapter name appears in the top bar and on each page, so you always know where you are. In the Pages view, turning the last page of a chapter takes you straight to the first page of the next one. In the Scroll view, a Next chapter button appears at the end of each chapter.

Your place is saved for each book and shared across the three views, Pages, Scroll and Chat, which delivers a chapter one sentence at a time. You can switch views mid-chapter and carry on from the same sentence. I wrote about reading in Chat on tired evenings in Practical Tips for Reading with ABC George Every Day. Finished books are marked as read in your library.

There are no ads and no account, and once a book is downloaded it reads offline. The steps to your first book are in Getting Started with ABC George.