Did Not Finish Titles [DNF] - And Why

[Dr. Drib]

Almost all of us have been there. Some readers are so troubled by this condition that they can't sleep. Some people ponder. They think. They overthink. They think why they overthink. They agonize. They masticate, chewing who-knows-what in their mental constipation. (Hey! How the hell would I know??!!)

For example, it used to bother me if I gave up on a book. But then I changed my way of thinking, and now it no longer troubles me to stop reading a title I was once invested in. It has absolutely nothing to do with the old maxim that life is too short. For some people, life is too long. Rather, it has to do with what I'm looking for in a book, or what I hope to discover in a book. Much of it, then, has to do with expectations. But I do like my expectations shattered once in a while, especially when reading within the Horror genre.

OK: So what happened? Are you a 'bad' decision-maker? Or just plain lazy? Don't want to challenge yourself? Didn't like the writer's style? Too boring? - (I've encountered that with some modern Sci-Fi. And some Fantasy titles, I might add.) Please feel free to fill in your own reasons.

Constructive criticism and opinions matter, especially if your thoughts resonate with another individual's feelings. Or maybe your constructive criticism will shed light on an issue that that another potential reader hadn't considered, which will cause that person to WANT to read that title. Or maybe reinforce and strengthen someone's feelings on why that person choose NOT TO READ a specific title.

[Calenorn]

The beauty of an ereader with copious memory is that you can easily return to a book you've abandoned in mid-stream. When the mood suits, it's still right there. No inconvenience whatsoever. (Unless it's a library book. Then you have a deadline.)

A related question: did you ever read a book that was so wretched or offensive that you felt the need to delete it from your ereader's memory?

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by Calenorn

The beauty of an ereader with copious memory is that you can easily return to a book you've abandoned in mid-stream. When the mood suits, it's still right there. No inconvenience whatsoever. (Unless it's a library book. Then you have a deadline.)

A related question: did you ever read a book that was so wretched or offensive that you felt the need to delete it from your ereader's memory?

WRETCHED: The answer to that question is 'No'.
OFFENSIVE: Also, 'No'.

One book, in particular, is so wretched that I love how horrible it is. I have it in calibre, but it will take some time to find it if you are interested in it. (I'm trying to remember the title.) -- Noooooo, it's not The Moon People, although that book is happily wretched and also very much worth reading due to the books wretchedness. (NOTE: The Kindle edition is not formatted correctly; for correct formatting look at the PDF.)

[Calenorn]

I encounter the "so bad it's good" phenomenon in music quite often. The technical term is "craptastic!!!".

[curtw]

Titus Groan started out fascinating, but then got to the point where it took 3-4 pages to describe an event that only took 10-20 seconds to play out. That's my "nope."

Heinlein's Number of the Beast did the same.

Don't even get me started on The Silmarillion.

[hobnail]

I have 3 tabs pinned in my browser for ereaderiq and I'd guess that I get at least 7 free books a week. As a way of reducing the volume I now restrict myself to male authors. Since I can't read one book a day I have to be aggressive at not wasting time on dud books. For me a dud book is one where I don't feel any connection or sympathy for the main character, where the characters are merely chess pieces on the board moved around for the sake of the story. So if I don't get that feeling after a few chapters, sometimes as few as one, I mark the book as finished and move on to the next one.

It does get discouraging and tiresome after having finished a great book or series and then having to slog through the first few chapters of a dozen or more duds.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by curtw

Don't even get me started on The Silmarillion.

I read that. It turned out to be really boring. It felt like I was reading a text book.

[JSWolf]

One book I am really disjointedness that I bothered to finish given how terribly awful it is is Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard.

[Karellen]

I try to finish all the books I start reading. For those books that I intensely dislike, I tend to just skip through the novel. Depending on the flow of the novel, I'll read only the first line of paragraphs, or maybe just read the first couple start and end paragraphs of the chapter, or maybe skipping whole chapters. I notice that most books have "catch up" sections, maybe where the protagonist is explaining to another character what is going on, so I tend to look out for those as the "story so-far" filler.

It may sound a weird way to read, but I satisfy my OCD and have "finished" the book. You probably think, "how can you understand the book reading that way", strangely while I might not have the in depth understanding of the book, which I have already decided I don't care about, but I can certainly understand the broad brushstrokes of the story, its direction and conclusion.

I just completed the Divergent books, and that is exactly what I did there. I was so surprised as I really enjoyed the movies, but thoroughly disliked the books.

Oh, geez, don't get me started on The Silmarillion. WTF was that about. It was one of the rare books that I just closed, marked as 1 star and placed the dreaded "Never Read Again" tag on the book. The first couple of chapters and I had already been introduced to 500 odd characters. It was written "bible-like" and sounded like one long recital of a family tree. Boron, son of Gloin, father of John, cousin of Terry, Uncle of George, blah, blah, blah. And people go crazy for this book???

[astrangerhere]

I DNF'd a very popular science fiction title because of the very graphic description of a sexual assault in the first 30 pages. I am not squeamish - my job is to represent domestic violence victims - but it was not handled well AT ALL. It felt performative and gratuitous and did not serve a great point in the story, even if that character was going to become someone awesome later. If you have to do something that brutal to a female character just to give her a redemptive arc, you aren't a very good storyteller.

[gmw]

Originally Posted by curtw

[...] Heinlein's Number of the Beast did the same.

Don't even get me started on The Silmarillion.

Yes, Number of the Beast is probably one of my most memorable DNFs. 30 pages of Heinlein at his best follow by far too many pages of Heinlein at his worst. I still sometimes wonder if there were any more good pages buried in there somewhere, but haven't been tempted to try again.

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I read that. It turned out to be really boring. It felt like I was reading a text book.

I read The Silmarillion when I was still in my finish-what-I-start phase*, which corresponded with my only-read-once phase, both now in the past. I have been happily re-reading favourite books for many years, but I still struggle to put away books I am not enjoying.

But JSWoilf, I think your comment is close to correct. The works in this book were background and study and experimentation for the author. Yes, there are a few gems in amongst the collection, but really they are suitable for only the most avid enthusiast (of which there are many) ... and film-makers, I guess: those that want to squeeze the last drop of Middle Earth out of the source material. If you were the sort of reader to read (and enjoy) the appendices that came in The Lord of the Rings then The Silmarillion is for you, otherwise skip it.


* I got through the Bible in the same way, which - as Karellen observed - The Silmarillion bears some similarity to. I remember thinking that at the time.

[gmw]

I've rarely dropped a book due to the content ... well, not in the way that usually implies. I have dropped some books in recent years after discovering that my taste for military SF and fantasy appears to have evaporated. I should have DNFed Clive Cussler's The Mediterranean Caper due to content early in the book - actually the title should have been enough. The later books were very sexist, but that first is appalling. It has since been renamed Mayday, presumably to try and avoid the bad press, you have been warned.

Sometimes I DNF because I don't like the prose. I've tried a few books by Cassandra Clare for example, and while the stories seemed good enough I was constantly on edge waiting for the next sentence that was going to throw me. (This is reverse of books I would read and enjoy even just for the author's voice.)

Some of my DNFs are the result of poor decision making. Sometimes I don't bother to read the first few pages before purchase, and then I open the book and cringe at clumsy first-person prose and think: Oops! I think this is partly fed by the whole ebook thing: it's so easy, and often cheap, to pick up books that I take less care with my choices than when it used to be an expedition to the shops and a much more significant investment for each book.

Some DNFs are books that I really did expect to enjoy, or at least find readable, only to find my eyelids drooping. Such books can be hard to pin down as to why they are not working - the prose, the story, the lack of connection, the voice, all of the above - but when find myself choosing to work rather than pick up my ereader I know it's time to go.

But mostly I DNF because I'm bored. I know things are going badly when I find myself picking holes in the plot, in the characters, in the proof-reading - all things I can be quite forgiving of if I'm enjoying myself.

[allanahk]

Originally Posted by astrangerhere

I DNF'd a very popular science fiction title because of the very graphic description of a sexual assault in the first 30 pages. I am not squeamish - my job is to represent domestic violence victims - but it was not handled well AT ALL. It felt performative and gratuitous and did not serve a great point in the story, even if that character was going to become someone awesome later. If you have to do something that brutal to a female character just to give her a redemptive arc, you aren't a very good storyteller.

Which book was that - so I know to avoid it! I'm absolutely sick of gratuitous SA in books/films, I hate it (and yes I know it can be realistic but I don't need to be reminded of that).

In a similar vein, I never finished Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey. Felt very uncomfortable and decided to just give up

Another one I gave up on was the Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson. He's absolutely revered in some parts of the internet so I thought I would give it a go, but ended up hating it. Boring characters, juvenile writing, stupid plot.

[haertig]

Some DNF's that I remember off the top of my head:

The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
The Road - Cormac McCarthy
The Plains of Passage - Jean Auel
Runner - Patrick Lee

The Dumas book - I just don't like the old style of language. Too stilted and boring. I was falling asleep between sentences. I like the story, and enjoyed the movie, but reading it as originally written by Dumas - not my cup of tea.

The McCarthy book - Written in short broken sentences, where a thought often spans multiple sentences. Too choppy for me to enjoy. I like a writing style where chapters flow into the next chapter, paragraphs flow into the next paragraph, and sentences flow into the next sentence. In The Road, it felt like I was trying to put a train of thought together after it had been run through the shredder.

The Auel book - I think I just grew tired of the story. I like the story. And it surprises me that I grew tired of it. I think it was one of the many caveman sex scenes, or one of the long diatribes on medicinal plants that was the straw that broke the camel's back for me. I can't remember what finally drove me off, but I think it was Ayla being enraptured watching wooly mammoths having sex.

The Lee book - I like Patrick Lee's writing style, his other books, and even the first 1/3 of Runner that I made it through. But then he introduced a new villain that disgusted me. I don't like reading about mentally ill folks with voices in their head telling them to go kill someone by hitting them with a hammer. I assumed that this new character was going to play a large part in the rest of the book, and I just don't enjoy reading about sickos. Just a few pages reading about him made me discard the book. What a shame ... it was a good book. I still may go back to this one some day, based on my like for Lee's other books.

[astrangerhere]

Originally Posted by allanahk

Which book was that - so I know to avoid it! I'm absolutely sick of gratuitous SA in books/films, I hate it (and yes I know it can be realistic but I don't need to be reminded of that).

In a similar vein, I never finished Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey. Felt very uncomfortable and decided to just give up

Another one I gave up on was the Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson. He's absolutely revered in some parts of the internet so I thought I would give it a go, but ended up hating it. Boring characters, juvenile writing, stupid plot.

Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl