“A completist abdicates that distinction with a peculiar mixture of sorrow and relief. The long march through Godard’s hardcore Maoist period becomes too arduous to bear; … the long-ago passion for searching out Bowie oddities has devolved into a grudge: It is time to bail, and with the bailing comes a faintly mournful sense of liberation. Thus it is that I abandon all hope of reading everything Ralph Ellison (1914-1994) ever published.”