Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish and is now hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together. Each week a new theme is suggested for bloggers to participate in. Create your own Top Ten list that fits that topic – putting your unique spin on it if you want. Everyone is welcome to join but please link back to The Artsy Reader Girl in your own Top Ten Tuesday post.
This week’s topic is Petty Reasons You’ve DNF’d a Book.
I’m still learning to DNF books – I’ve always been a bit of a Magnus Magnusson “I’ve started, so I’ll finish” but over the last 18 months or so, I’ve started learning that it’s ok to stop reading a book I’m not enjoying for any reason. It doesn’t matter if I’m 5% or 65% of the way through – it’s not fair on the author, on the book, on me and life is too short/my TBR is too big to read a book I’m not enjoying.
Although I do find, especially with Libby and Borrowbox where I try more different variety of book than I otherwise would, that there’s a lot of books I stop reading somewhere in the first parag/first page and they don’t even get logged as started in order TO DNF – I basically class them as not started. But I will be including them here.
So, in no particular order – and I don’t know petty some of these are per se:
Layout/formatting issues or choices
If there’s no paragraph breaks and I’m facing just a huge wall of text, that’s an instant nope for me. The same goes for no speech marks when characters are talking – It just gives me the ick.
Lack of editing
I once DNFed a book because the tense had changed three times on one page and the guitarist was playing a ‘cord’. It’s a lack of care, and I’m not reading something that hasn’t had even the most basic of editing.
Short chapters
I HATE short chapters – when they’re just two or three pages long. It feels like I’m being constantly thrown out of the story, especially when the POV or scene changes every time. It feels like the author doesn’t know how to finish a scene so just… stops. I refuse to read James Patterson because of it.
I don’t like the narrative voice
Sometimes, you just don’t like the ‘sound’ (I don’t listen to audiobooks so I mean the written voice as it were) of the narrative – often for me it’s because it feels flat or boring and leaves me not caring. I also don’t have a huge amount of patience for an unreliable narrator.
Multiple perspectives/POV but they sound the same
Following on from that, when a book is being told from multiple characters’ perspectives, but the narrative voice doesn’t change and sounds exactly the same. I should be able to tell without your header telling me that this is a different person narrating this bit of the story because no two people sound the same.
Story/topic just doesn’t grab me
I have ADHD and all the related attention-span fun that comes along with that. If a book doesn’t grab my attention within the first couple of pages then chances are, I’ll put it down to do something else and never pick it back up again.
It started off well but lost my interest
Sometimes, a book will get past that initial attention-grab, I’ll keep reading it and it seems like everything’s going well. Only then I’ll realise I haven’t picked it up in 6 months, I don’t actually care about the characters or the story, I pass over it every time I’m picking what I’m going to finish/read next, and I just don’t want to read it. And so it gets DNFed.
Unlikable characters
I prefer plot-based stories to character-based ones, I like books where something happens but at the same, I have to care about the people that the plot is happening to. If I don’t care about them or the things happening to them, there’s no point in continuing to read.
Jumping the shark
When a story hits the point where its just throwing in random ideas out of completely nowhere that have nothing in common with anything else in the story, I end up just rolling my eyes and being completely DONE. There was one book I was reading last year that I DNFed at 46% because out of the blue the narrative just went ‘oh, BTW, main character’s secretly actually a hellhound’ and NOPE.
Hyperfixation over
This is more for non-fiction books but quite often I’ll have a hyperfixation on a particular topic and start reading All The Things. But then that hyperfixation can disappear as quickly as it starts and I have absolutely no interest in finishing, for example, the random chemistry/geology/astrophysics (to name a few examples from the last year or so) book that I started months ago.
What are some things that will make you DNF a book?
