I very rarely put down a book. I find it so hard to give up on a story because I always wonder if I hang on just a little longer whether it might get better. It’s a work in progress and I think I’m improving because there’s just nothing worse than sticking through a slog of a read, only to find it puts you in a reading slump.

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly event hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl and this week’s prompt is:

The Last Ten Books I Abandoned

I really do envy the people who DNF (“did not finish”) books all the time. It seems like such a power move. Oh to have such clarity and certainty about what I want!! I’ve only DNF’d thirteen books in my life so today I’ll be sharing ten of those. For the most part, many of these are freebies or lesser-known books that I had a crack at but didn’t gell with.

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1. Agency
by William Gibson

I tried so hard but this was so difficult for me to get into. I gave up quite early one after I was overwhelmed by deep-end dive into world-building that left me with so many questions. Gibson expects the reader to build up the context as they go along but this style of writing just isn’t for me. I simply had no clue what was going on.

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2. The Last Day
by Andrew Hunter Murray

This book was such a disappointment! I got about a third of the way through before deciding enough was enough. Despite a really cool plot about a world that stops turning, leaving half in dark and half in sun (AND despite Stephen Fry blurbing this with high praise) I found it unbelievably boring. It totally lacked in plot and I wasn’t willing to stick around in case it got better.

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3. The Honourable Thief
by Meaghan Wilson Anastasios

I was so disappointed that I didn’t love this. Anastasios had previously written The Water Diviner (co-authoring with her partner) and I had loved both the book and the film. Which meant I went into this with quite high expectations. However, I found the main character so unbelievably unlikeable that I just had to put it down.

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4. The Romance Reader’s Guide to Life
by Sharon Pywell

This was a book where the title hooked me in but it was not what I was expecting. Truth be told (if I remember rightly) I saw this cover and title and wrongly assumed that this would be a fun and light-hearted contemporary. But it turned out to be a sluggish historical fiction. I put this down very quickly.

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5. The Spider and the Stone
by Glen Craney

I tried so hard with this book but good god, I was just too long. I had independently been reached out to from the author to review this and nothing makes me feel more guilty than when that scenario doesn’t work out! This was quite a heavy-going histroical fiction and just too long, I couldn’t get through it and it didn’t hold my attention.

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6. Dragon Champion
by E. E. Knight

I WANTED TO LIKE THIS SO BADLY. I was tragically upset when I realised how nope this book was. It sounds like we’re going to get a super duper epic tale about dragons, and we nearly do. It’s from a young dragon’s perspective but the language and style of the writing was so off-putting that I found it ridiculous and gave up halfway through.

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7. Broken Forest
by Eliza Tilton

I thought the blurb had sounded interesting for this one but alas, I found the story a bit meh. This was a free eBook so I hadn’t felt too guilty giving up on this one. I think in the end it just didn’t draw me in enough and I felt neither one way or another about continuing to read it.

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8. Seed
by Rob Ziegler

This sounded like such an epic sci-fi! I think I did also confuse this book with another popular book, still not 100% sure about that. But I think there’s another book out there with a similar title that everyone loves and I thought this was it, but it was not. I borrowed this from the library, I remember, but just found the style not to my taste in the end.

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9. Cyberwar
by R.J. Huneke

 

Oh god, I remember how long I persevered with this one. I won it from a Goodreads giveaway way back in the day and just found this awful. It was boring and slow but I felt soooo obliged to finish it. After what had definitely been more than a month trying to slog through this relatively short read, I finally let myself put it down and move the heck on.

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10. Psychonaut
by K.Z. Freeman

I don’t remember much about this book except for how quickly I put it down. Yet another sci-fi that didn’t tickle my fancy. I’m beginning to see a pattern here. Not only that, but another review copy/free eBook which is always a risk!

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That’s a wrap!

Do you often DNF books?

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~~ Kirstie ~~

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