Secondhand Time

It is rare that I review a book before I finish it. Sometimes I do this with bad books that I have not completed — but that is what the Goodreads user base calls DNFing it, explicitly saying that I am not going to finish, and therefore am capital-D done with it. I do it every so often with video games, too, where even if my interest in completing the thing end-to-end is waning, I still want to record my thoughts. And I feel comfortable with that because gaming is a different experience and mechanism than consuming literature. Books, generally speaking, are about the gestalt, and it is hard to opine on the full quality of one without knowing how it ends, and the feeling that comes over you when you close it and sit with your thoughts. A game, conversely, can be called a success if it entertains you meaningfully and deeply for some portion of time, even if you put it down while there is still content left to experience. So I am breaking with tradition here. I am talking about Secondhand…