You wanted to read the book, you were excited to crack it open, you came into it with good faith and anticipation… but you ended up dnf-ing it. Which book and why?
Mine was The Maid by Nita Prose. It was for my book club and looked like a fun murder mystery. Instead I got instant manic-pixie-dream-neurodivergent-girl vibes, and I noped out before the crime scene was even found.
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Darkly Dreaming Dexter. My goodness, it’s so poorly written. MC comes off like a 16 year old teenager’s concept of witty psychopath, top that off with painful exposition and I couldn’t finish. Awful writing.
The Fourth Wing is getting to me. I can’t get past the weird writing style. It’s bothered me from the second paragraph “I tighten the straps of my heavy canvas rucksack and trudge up the wide staircase of the stone fortress I call home. My chest heaves with exertion, my lungs burning by the time I reach the stone corridor leading to General Sorrengail’s office”. The author then keeps this weird tense in dialogue. So many “I” statements. It’s like it’s both a journal recount and happening in real time.
ACOTAR- I just couldn’t stand any of the characters. I tried to like it so hard but I just couldn’t.
I recently gave up on Angle of Repose pretty quickly. First I found out that Stegner heavily plagiarized it from a real woman’s papers, then the narrator was a reactionary old crank. Not worth spending 500 pages with.
Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder, page 48.
!Gratuitous animal cruelty!<
Will I get shamed for saying Mistborn? The whole heist style crew gathering was too cheese for me
Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco. Reading the description of the Musée des arts et métiers in the first chapter, I wanted to visit it first before finishing the book :)
Depends how you classify DNF, if it’s from the moment you intend to read something then like two moments later when I read the back and it sounds whack, or I read a page and it’s a writing style I can’t get into.
The Hobbit. Got a few pages in. Did not like.
This was in high school; I might appreciate it now. I have done the LotR books though, and I liked them, even if they were a bit heavy on description for my taste. :)
The poppy wars. I read the first book, but will never touch the sequels(which to me still counts as I did not finish the story). Everyone recommended it, said it was amazing and to it’s credit it’s very original, but it sucks. The author handles her characters in the worst ways possible. Example a character bullies the protagonist, dies, then amazing he survived, and there is this moment were it’s implying “he has powers” and he will end up friend or lovers with the protagonist but nope dead again in 50 pages. Far from my only issue with the book but it’s just poor story telling.
Actually, same book, but quicker DNF for me. Opened The Maid at my local library and didn’t get past the second page because the writing style is sooooo unpleasant to me. I acknowledge that this is subjective, but to me, it just seemed the author was trying to use every “pretty” turn of phrase there ever was, all at once. Just blithely lining up the clichés - going nowhere. :(
10 pages into Brave New World. I was only 14 and it was just too much. Didn’t understand a word of it.
Probably Dharma Bums, which I read one chapter of and found very self-obsessed and boring. There have been many that I’ve unintentionally DNFd after about ~50 pages, because life gets distracting and ADHD makes it hard to remember to read at the times when I can.
Kite runner, 7 pages, and I knew it wasn’t my type of read.
Silmarillion. I love that world, loved the Hobbit, loved the LoTR books. I tried Silmarillion at least 4 times and was never able to make it past the first page. It reads like Genesis in the Bible.