Related question - do you always have to finish a book, cover to cover, before you can say you’ve read it?
Discussion
Oo good question - I do, just cos the last quarter of a book can surprise you. What about you?
For nonfiction books, if I have read more than half of the book and browsed through the remaining content to get an overall picture of what the book contains, I consider it read.
It’s different when it comes to fiction – there, I wouldn’t dare to claim I’m familiar with the book unless I’ve read it in its entirety.
That said, there are bizarre situations when I’ve started reading some works of fiction multiple times but never finished them – so I know half the book very well, while the rest remains unknown to me.
This typically happens to me with Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath..