Not being able to close a book without reading everything in it is a problem. People need to get over this, it's compulsive behavior. You don't have to read all the essays, just close the book, nobody's keeping score.
A physicist friend of mine changed my life by simply saying that the reader is under no obligation to or has a contract with the author that he needs to read everything the author wrote. I cam across the more poetic Soseki later.
I've recently run into the opposite problem -I have 20 samples I'd like to finish and 6-8 books I put down that I want to pick back up. I'm starting to lose track.
Also as an aside, kindle library organization UI is really terrible.
Maybe that urge (or need for the satisfaction) stems from having paid for a book or keeping a list of "read" books etc., But it's not worth the time and effort. If you find a book uninteresting, just close it and move on. If you linger on it later you can always return to it.
https://tracydurnell.com/2023/08/19/my-reading-philosophy-an...
Technical books have whole sections you can easily skip until the day you may need it. Non-fiction can be read faster when it's explained in details.
I guess fiction big books are the ones you have to read entirely to be satisfied.
I guess the article's point is that an essay is presenting one idea in the smallest amount of sentences possible. Imagine you do that and get an essay with 100 pages. It means that 90 pages is not enough to understand the idea. Now, imagine I uselessly triple the number of pages by repeating each sentence in 3 different ways. In this case, if I just read the first 100 pages and stop, I did not understood the idea, and reading these 100 pages was at best useless (the situation is the same as if I did not know the idea at all) or more realistic counter-productive (I have badly understood the idea).
As for one 100-page essay, you should definitely be able to understand the idea within 90 pages (hopefully 10 pages). The author might need 100 pages to close off all major counterarguments, cite precedence, explore some second-order tradeoffs, underscore the importance of their argument using evidence, and lay the groundwork for future areas of investigation.
We could say "just cut out that stuff" but that weakens the essay and makes it shallow. Instead, it's uo to the reader to skip it if they don't have time or interest. But then they should also hold off on dismissing it based on counterarguments for which they declined to read the provided rebuttals.
Even if you are right, you still acknowledge that you need a "core" explanation for the essay and that stopping before finishing it is not enough to grasp the idea properly. The only things the author of the article says is that it's better if the core explanation is not stretched in length for no real reason. So, it demonstrates that it is not the same as for a novel. The so-called "paradox" or "hypocrisy" does not exist.
It's like pretending that someone is hypocritical if they both say "I like movies where the main character does a lot of fighting" and "I really don't like the fact that my physics professor does a lot of fighting during their lecture".
But you raise an interesting point. I really like The Hall of Uselessness by Simon Leys, but have I read every essay in it? I think so, but am not sure.