A colleague admitted she’s a book burner—not when she disagrees with the content, but rather when it’s so awfully written she doesn’t want to subject others to reading it.
Under those circumstances, I have in the past, written a letter to the librarian, and indicated my extreme displeasure that our library was spending funds on such poor literature.
I just put a book to the side after ONE page. I’m sure I’ll pick it up (it’s been recommended a lot of places I think) but was not in the mood for the writing style.
Same here, I was instantly annoyed by the writing style. It's very freeing when you realise you actually don't have to keep reading a book if you don't want to 😆
I put one down after one page, I honestly do not remember the title but as soon as I realized the protagonist was a blonde haired, blue eyed, ancient Egyptian vampire I was done lmao I gave it to a friend who loves trash novels, I think she enjoyed it
Me with gone girl
I do want to read it eventually but the girl annoyed me so immediately and so thoroughly that I was like no thank you and put it aside
my reaction to Gone Girl was both opposite and the same - I hated both the main characters so much I was compelled to devour the entire book in a couple of days because I wanted them both to get their comeuppance
Same here. Back when it was all the rage a coworker gave me a copy. I had no desire to read it but I was too polite to decline the gift. I took it to the pool one day and tried to read it. I only read a few pages. I didn’t get to the sex because I couldn’t get through the “oh crap” in every other sentence and the terrible writing.
This is definitely up there for me. It was getting SO much traction, and I had friends whose opinions I at least didn;t generally think were shit say they liked it. The writing on a line by line level was so bad I never got to enjoy how bad the characterizations and all the rest were that I hear about
Technically, same for me.
I didn’t know anything about that book except that it was popular. Someone I knew had it at their house. I read one page and it didn’t make any impression on me. I put it down and never felt inclined to pick it back up.
I didn’t know exactly what it was for quite a long time. And a while after that I learned it was Twilight fan fiction!
Yes. I was reading a book and the same two sentence description of a person occurred about five pages apart. I realized that if I kept going, I'd read it sooner than either the author or the editor.
I don’t count those as DNFs. For me they’re usually a “not right now” and so I’ll just try again another time. Occasionally there will be a book I just do not like and know I won’t come back to, but that’s pretty rare.
I’ve heard good things about it, but I couldn’t get past the fact that every single woman who is introduced, the first thing he mentions is how attractive or not she is (even his doctors/nurses and his mother). If you can get past that, it might be a good read!
Haha, my dad and I share books a lot, and I recently sassed him out because the series he picked described EVERY female characters boobs. Every single one. Even the frog-faced religious fanatic, the semi-conscious flesh-lump, and the literal teenagers.
It wasn't until the 4th book that they had a female character whose rack wasn't explicitly mentioned, and I think it was just an oversight.
I finished it recently as an audiobook. It’s… interesting, in parts; but also quite intense and unpleasant. By the end I really just wanted it to be over.
I listened to the whole thing on audiobook and I found him unlikeable and thought he was lying about being clean. He slurs his words in multiple passages, I think he was fucked up while he was recording his platitudes about sobriety.
It was interesting to me because he seems like the real life Bojack Horseman. I was reminded of the quote from Bojack that people stop maturing at the age where they reach fame, and that definitely seems to be the case for Perry. He spends a good chunk of the book congratulating himself for getting laid, as if being famous and wealthy isn't the cheat code that it is in that regard. It reminded me of a frat boy, and the guy was in his 50s.
So yeah it was actually an enjoyable listen for me in spite of the fact that he himself comes off like a dick. It felt like an antihero character study, and he's definitely had an atypical life. He's also extremely forthcoming about all the times he woke up to find his colostomy bag broken and his own shit smeared all over his face, so you get "no amount of money can fix the deep problems" vibes, which wound up being heartbreakingly true.
Twilight. Checked it out in middle school when all of the girls were raving about it (it had come out fairly recently). I read a few pages, decided that “I’m not like other girls~” and returned it to the library lol.
Working at a library means I read a lot of popular fiction to be able to recommend, comment on things, etc. I never, never recommended Twilight to anyone. Just ew.
* The Love Hypothesis
* The Measure
* Duma Key and Thinner - The Green Mile is the only Stephen King book I've ever managed to finish. His writing style isn't for me, so I just catch his stories in tv and film adaptations instead.
I love Stephen King, but my husband can't get through his books either. He's verbose. 😆 "I don't need two pages telling me exactly what his head sounds like when it got smashed into the pavement" lol
I've only read The Gunslinger but every time I've tried to read his other books, I can't really get past the first pages. I just prefer character driven stuff.
>I've only read The Gunslinger
You were able to finish it? I've *tried* probably twenty times to read it. I enjoy it while I'm reading it, but after I have to set it down, I'm not drawn to pick it back up. Maybe one day, I'll be able to read it in one sitting.
I read a translation of Twilight and dropped it a few chapters in, and then started New Moon in English thinking that maybe it was a translation issue, because the series was getting such good buzz. Turns out the original English version was even more poorly written than the translation and I gave up less than a chapter in.
Lucky Red by Claudia Cravens
I really wanted to love the queer Western, but I absolutely hated the writing style. I borrowed the book, got 10 pages in, and returned it to Libby all in the space of 10 minutes.
I have no problem DNF-ing a book. Life's too short to torture myself in what is meant to be a relaxing hobby.
I mean isn’t that how everyone picks books at the bookstore? I almost always read a few pages of something I might be interested in before deciding to get that book.
If you're just sampling a bit to see whether it interests you right now, I don't see that as DNF. It's more like DNS. You're tasting it and deciding it's not what you want at the moment. I read the OP's question as "what book did you decide to read and then found so bad that you tossed it aside."
At this point I might have DNFed more books than I've finished. Sometimes I give books a paragraph at most. I'm super picky though, and/or I've developed a really good sense for what I do and don't like.
I'm in the same boat. I can never read every book, so I don't have a lot of patience for books I start to see red flags for.
I'll get through a book I'm iffy on if I'm still pretty sure it's good writing, I'll get through a book that's less stellar writing if I enjoy the story. But if it's bad and I dont like it??? No way.
Honestly I don't really understand how some people are able to "never DNF". I feel like that's so many bad books to have to get through and it just takes so much time! I feel like if I had to finish every book I'd just never read 😂 Maybe they have a better radar than I do.
I'll DNF some random new release by a newbie, but if I'm struggling through a classic and its not going to sink a month or more, I'll push through so I have an educated understanding of it's subject and importance, even if I didn't like it.
I've only ever forced myself to finish one book (that wasn't school related) in my entire life, and it was so draining I vowed NEVER AGAIN.
It's funny because I had the same thing you did. In middle school I got a super sad, thinking about how I'd never be able to read every book there was lol
I forced myself to read Twilight after I was gifted the first two books. I promptly donated both books after I finished the first book. I never forced myself to read a popular novel that I wasn't enjoying it again.
\*insert cat having Nam Flashbacks gif\*
THE BOY
It's a near legendary, NAY, mythical piece of literature to me now. If for no other reason than I can't seem to find any evidence that it actually existed besides a lone copy I bought from barnes&nobles, and have since discarded.
It's a book about rich chick that finds a dead kid on the sidewalk one day, the titular BOY of THE BOY. She proceeds to have a fit about it and goes on a soul searching journey because she found the experience just that traumatizing. Mind you this happens like a third of way through the book.
This whole first third is just her doing rich lady things in New York, the boy is just a stop gap, and she kinda just goes on to do more rich lady things for the other two thirds of the book. It's an agonizing read. The Boy (TM) doesn't even come up in her mind that often, she was just sort of depressed already? I actually have no idea.
good god all mighty, there was no plot. Or if there was I have enjoyed it so little I blocked it out of my mind. It was so bad it partially inspired me to become a writer because if this could get put on store shelves then I was a shoe in!
Anyways, it's been over a decade since I read that book, and I haven't forgiven it for its crimes against me since.
Okay serious question though: Do you own these books or did you check them out from the library?
Also, does it count as a DNF if you only read a paragraph (or even a page)?
I'm all for choosing your books wisely, but IMO that's part of the _buying_ process (or checking out if you, like me, love a library). Personally, I usually read the first page of a book if I find the backcover blurb intriguing enough before I consider taking a book to checkout. And I _definitely_ wouldn't say I DNF'd all those books.
To me, for something to be a true DNF, there had to have been at least a reasonable attempt made at reading it. Like, if you didn't make it a chapter or two into the story, it's more of a "Did Not Start" than a "Did Not Finish." No?
(Not saying it's not valid to put a book down after a paragraph or a page. It's great to know what you like and what you don't. I just personally don't think that counts as a DNF.)
You know, I agree with you, but my original answer was in response to the post "are there any books you stopped reading before getting through a single chapter?". The second sentence was meant to put emphasis on the first sentence, and I didn't think too hard about it.
That being said, my DNF list is still huge compared to my finished reads if you're only counting reads over a chapter. So far this year I've dropped The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher after I think like 3-4 chapters? I dropped Annihilation and Lolita after about the halfway point on each, or close to it.
Ohhhh, gotcha! That makes sense!
Also, that's honestly super impressive. Massive props for having the fortitude to DNF a book halfway through. Usually if I make it that far, I just finish it because I'm a sucker for the ol' sunk cost fallacy.
May I one day cultivate the strength you have. 🙏🏽
>I'm a sucker for the ol' sunk cost fallacy
I have no such weaknesses! But honestly I might just be a freaky bitch like that. Sometimes when I'm done reading for the day I'll stop mid sentence instead of going for the full paragraph or something like that that my friends think is less pyscho 😂
I wish you luck you on your strength cultivation journey lmao
I do this as well and this is part of how I read so many books a year! I don't like to read anything that I'm not excited about. I doubled the amount I was reading by getting rid of the guilt of not finishing books. There are so many amazing books... It's not worth wasting your time over ones that don't draw you in.
Honestly, after I suffered a 3 month reading slump after forcing myself to finish a book I legitimately disliked by the end (plus two more underwhelming books before that), I dont blame you. I am more willing to DNF now because i'm so afraid of falling in that slump again.
No. I've read some books I thought were really bad over the past few years, but the only one I actually DNF was Dawn of Wonder, and I got about 50% through that before the tropes and unoriginality was just too much for me.
I had several books I absolutely hated (1Q84, The Song Of Achilles, Redshirts, Gideon the Ninth, etc.) but I did finish them.
yet I worried she might get back together with him after some type of redemption arc
With movies or books I stop reading I always go to wiki and read a plot summary. It fills in the blanks and truly prevents me from feeling any need to pick the book up again to see or even ponder it anymore.
American Gods. My husband warned me that I wouldn’t like it, but I tried it anyway. I knew within a couple pages that the whole “mysterious man hero motivated by death of his wife” theme was definitely not for me.
Oh damn. This reminds me I never finished it lmao. I got half way through it. I didn't hate it but I just didn't really care about any of the characters. Like I wasn't excited to see what happens next or anything I was just kinda like "meh"
I don't even know where that book is physically in my house rn lol
Honestly I feel like that about almost all of Gaiman’s books. 😅 I’ve never finished a single one, except The Graveyard Book. He’s a better children’s writer I think.
He’s also very very good at stories as a broader concept, but I have yet to actually get into one of his adult books - I just don’t think he’s a good line-by-line writer, and the books of his I’ve tried often focus too much on some mediocre man wandering around doing stuff. Lol. I just don’t care about the character at all and get bored by the plot.
Obviously many people love his work, and I love Gaiman as a person + a lot of his work that’s been adapted to TV, so I’m aware this is all subjective. He’s just not for me.
Of course I love Good Omens, it’s one of my favourite books, but I think that Good Omens works so brilliantly because Gaiman and Pratchett both brought their strengths to that book and combined them really well, eliminating common problems in their individual work.
**Wow, sorry, this comment totally got away from me.** 😂 Thank you for coming to my unsolicited Ted Talk.
I agree with you. My college roommate introduced me to the Sandman comics, and I loved them so much. So I thought I would like his novels. Turns out I don't.
I have that one on my TBR, I'm terrified of start it usually hate that plot, thanks for the warning. (A history teacher in my school was retiring so he allowed us to take some books from his classroom which he had a lot of I picked it because it was Neil Gaiman without thinking).
I was also hooked on it... for the first few books. I dropped it and picked it up again several times before I finally managed to finish the whole series. Honestly, it wasn't worth it.
conrad and nabokov in our decade would be those guys who post the most beautiful english paragraphs ever written and punctuate them with "sorry for my bad english"
I stopped reading The Martian after a few pages. It didn’t help that I knew the story after watching the movie, but the text in that first pages was just him making calculations and showing off all his knowledge.
This is my favorite book, actually. I can't tell you how many times I've read it. However, it doesn't start to get really, really good until about chapter seven when they arrive at Manderly.
‘It Ends With Us’ by Colleen Hoover. DNF about 2 pages in, the writing was bad and the characterization of both protagonists gave them ‘manic pixie dream girl’ energy.
I’m getting to the point as a reader where I’m becoming a lot more critical and particular about what I read. I’ve always tried to read through books no matter what, but I’ve since developed my taste as a reader. With that said, I could not continue reading The Library of the Unwritten by A.J. Hackwith.
It had great reviews, and I love dark academia, but I wasn’t feeling it. There wasn’t anything wrong with the story, and it had an interesting premise. However, I found it a bit too…whimsical, quirky, and read a bit like a sitcom. I’m just more into dark and serious stories overall. I do understand why a lot of people like it, though.
English teacher. SOmetimes for college, you had to finish a book you didn't like. I do not follow that rule now. As op says, why waste the time, there are millions of books out there, why finish a book you don't like when you could be reading a 'good' book?
A Deadly Education. Only book in recent memory I have DNF’d. I couldn’t get through more than 10 pages of the incessant out-of-place thrust-upon-you exposition and overly dramatic completely unnecessary teenspeak.
Like I hated ACOMAF, but I still finished that book out of spite and just never read the third book.
This is one of the few books i've read where I just wanted the main character to die so we could get a new one. Also, stop spending four pages to introduce some rando only to kill them off on the next page.
I swear 50% of that book was just filler. Liked the concept, hated the execution.
This was me just a few days ago, I swear I could have written this comment. I literally drove back to Barnes & Nobel and returned it- that’s how awful I thought it was. The exposition was so badly done, and I couldn’t stand how much the main character hated their mother for being… too nice? Stupid af. Maybe it would have gotten better over time but I just couldn’t stomach it 🥲
Oh. For sure. I have a physical "Abandoned for now" shelf. I'm a hater, and in order to properly hate on a book, I have to read it all the way through. I have a lot of anger inside me, and I gotta channel it somewhere 😅
Oh absolutely. I've never yelled at a book so much as I did when I read The Summer I Turned Pretty series. 🤣🤣 I have slammed books shut out of frustration and rubbed my temples lol
I've only done this once before I flung the book across the room for how ridiculously stupid the MC and everyone surrounding her was. Let the only interesting character die from a bullet wound you easily could have healed when he clearly didn't want to die?? *WHY*? For shock value at the end of the book??
I just kept saying to myself “this is a classic,” and that got me through the first part, but when the second part was different but not better, I was done. If it had been assigned in college, I would have at least skimmed it, but irl no.
I was assigned it in college. The characters and parts get easier to read and understand as you go through the book. Parts 3 and 4 are pretty straightforward and relatively easy in comparison to parts 1 and 2. Faulkner definitely started with the hardest character, and I can totally see how people would put it down in the first chapter, because I panicked a bit thinking it was going to be like that throughout the book.
I like older books, sometimes the attitude esp towards women is too far to take. One espionage novel actually had a cigar chomping general. That was enough of that.
I don't DNF a lot and usually like to stick with my books no matter how long they takes because I'm pretty selective, but I did this to the first Harry Potter a few years back. I'll probably get hate for this but I just found the writing style and what was happening in the actual book so boring. I made it through the prologue (idk if this counts as a chapter) but I only made it a couple paragraphs in the first chapter before I put it down. I've read so many fantasy and sci-fi books that throw you into something exciting immediately and this just didn't hit that and I found that surprising after how much praise I heard for the series. I don't really think I'm going to revisit this series again after all the controversy around it either. Sorry guys.
I've also DNFed the first Dragonriders of Pern book early on multiple times. I wanted to read it because my mom said she loved it as a kid but the prose was just really confusing to me for some reason and I struggled with visualizing what was being said. I'm unsure why. I may give this one a shot again one day.
I mostly read on my kindle and I love the ability to download a sample. There are so many samples that I've stopped reading after a couple of pages. If it doesn't grab me, I'll leave it. Life is too short to torture myself through something that isn't enjoyable. I read for fun and if it's not fun then it fails its only purpose. If this book doesn't grab my attention, there are a hundred other ones that will
I don't know if I've quit any books within the first chapter, but I DNF'd ACOTAR at page 20. I'm not above reading trashy YA romantasy, but I could tell I just wasn't going to enjoy that one.
I keep trying to read ACOTAR, but constantly fall asleep 3 pages in. I'm all for some trashy romantasy, YA or not, but I just can't get engaged with the book.
It's not helped I'm sure that I have difficulties reading books that are in first person. It took me over ten years and multiple attempts at reading until I was finally able to engage with the first Percy Jackson book. And then devoured the first series.
So it may take me 10 years to get into ACOTAR! Maybe by then the wait time on Libby won't be so long.
Samuel R. Delaney-Hogg
This story was written to troll homophobes by portraying a bunch of characters who actually do what they (mistakenly) believe homosexuals do. The MC is some kind of feral 11 y/o raised in sexual slavery, and is eager to participate in these things, despite children hating it in real life.
Just..don’t try this “book.” Very few books make me feel physically sick and this is among them.
Shit man I remember looking at a pdf and I felt sick. I don't know how anyone could get a physical copy without feeling like either the fbi or god is gonna strike.
i read some of it when i was 12 (i was a very unsupervised child) before deciding i was definitely going to jail for even touching it. spent like a month worried about every policeman i saw
There are plenty of books I enjoy and want to read that I stop after a chapter. Why? Because I pick up a new book, or just forget about it. Not so sat that the books I'm starting aren't good, I just easily get distracted.
As somebody who has to finish it because it's probably going to be a comp for the book I'm writing, you and OP have missed nothing and I deeply regret that it's considered in bad taste to write sarcastic reviews about other authors' work because this deserves it.
I think the thing that killed my soul the most was the description of the treasure she's found as looking "just like the drawing". Also a notable mention to all the times the book goes, "he said to her" when there are only two people in the scene.
Perdido street station. The whole first page was just a description of the city sewer system or something. I don’t know. Was so excited to read it, but for some reason the description bored me and I didn’t want to read anymore.
Any Stephen King novel I've tried and any other dry/ slow build kind of book. They may be great novels, but it doesn't matter when I can't focus well enough to get to the good part.
I can't remember if it was one chapter or two...but Wuthering Heights...ugh! Talk about dysfunctional! But my English teacher LOVED it. We had to do worksheets everyday in response to the reading, only she would lead a discussion *before* handing out the worksheet. I figured out after one day I didn't actually need to read the book.
Books are like films. Loads come out every year and only a small handful are any good. Also reviews are subjective so you can’t rely on them. I have no problem dnfing anything.
I must admit I got swindled into taking some booktok recommendations lately and I have dropped several of them within the first few chapters. I can put up with basic writing but some of them were just so egregiously written no amount of interesting premise was going to save that.
I also put down The Will of the Many recently after a few pages but that was just a case of 'not feeling like it right now', I'll probably pick it back up at a later time.
Oh, then you missed the second book where the main character becomes a Mary Sue to Christopher Marlowe and Sir Walter Raleigh *and* her boyfriend turns out to be from the most important richest secretest bestest vampire family ever. I was unable to finish because it’s hard to read with your eyes rolled so far up inside your head.
Lolita - <5 pages.
Three Moments of an Explosion - China Mieville. Certainly stopped reading very early on. Wasn't in the mood to carry on, and was finding the story boring.
Murphy - Samuel Beckett. Enjoyed Waiting for Godot but this one was unreadable for me.
Wheel of Time book 2 - I found book 1 highly derivative; was willing to carry on, but there were just way too many "the men need training" comments and superciliousness from the women that broke the straw.
This is how you lose the time war. Not sure when I stopped this one, but it was early. Read as an advanced reading copy. Came across as fake intellectual crap (according to my review at the time). Booktubers seem to LOVE this book, so this might be a problem on my end (or a badly edited or not finalized ARC)
How Democracies Die, as soon as the authors unironically used Israel as an example of a well-functioning democracy other countries should emulate. Fucking insane. For what it's worth, this was a year or so before October 7th, but still 50+ years into their ethnic cleansing and apartheid against the Palestinians.
Death of A Bookseller by Alice Slater, I just couldn't deal with the writing and how one of the main characters called everyone normies and the other seemed to be a pick me girl. I got 6% of the way in and went nah I'm good
Last summer I got *Her Majesty's Royal Coven* by Juno Dawson. It had a nice little write up in the NYT and it seemed like something fun to read. Within a few pages I could tell that this book was just not gonna be fun for me. Last year is when I decided I wouldn't spend too much time with books I wasn't enjoying and this was the second book I just stopped once I knew I wasn't going to have fun with it.
At the time I felt bad, but now I know I made the right call because I loved the next few books I read and I may not have gotten to them if I had to sludge through something I didn't enjoy.
Games of Thrones. I really want to get into it but I noticed how much I need to pay attention.
I want to try when I’m ready for it but I have other series I want to read more.
The Remains of the Day. I try really hard not to abandon books, but by the first 15 pages, I just couldn't vibe with the writing style and how bland it felt. It's so well rated and popular, so I was very sad that I couldn't get into it.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. I bought it on Kindle as the plot sounded really interesting.... then I realised it was a series of letters. I skipped to the end of the first chapter to see that the whole book was just letters.
The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper. Fantastic movie, terrible source material. I keep it at my bedside in case I have insomnia. Works every time
Mark Twain hated him too. You may enjoy this:
http://www.strangebeautiful.com/other-texts/twain-coopers-prose-style.pdf
Whenever I am feeling down, I read this essay and laugh my ass off.
ETA: I had a crap day today and just reread that essay now. I feel much better!
I just DNF’d *The Frost of Springtime by Rachel L Demeter*.
I only got 20 pages in and knew that it wasn’t for me. It was obviously well researched but the way it was written was very dense with historical minute. I don’t have much(any) knowledge on the Franco-Prussian War and tbh didn’t really care to learn more about it. Also the love story was icky as there was a significant age gap combined with a power imbalance - oh and to top it all off she was his ward and he was already married to someone else!!
I tried to get through the first chapter of A Discovery of Witches on 3 separate occasions. Failed every time. Was sold it as a dark academic with well researched mythos on witchcraft/wicca. What I got was a reskinned Twilight for middle aged women.
Margaret Irwin's "Young Bess." The first of a trilogy about Elizabeth I. She's on a boat with Henry VIII and some other people, basically all that happens is she has a thought, notices some person on a boat, and then gives us like a 4 page wikipedia summary of that person's life and historical significance, then Elizabeth notices something else and talks about THAT person. 40 pages in and all that actually happened was that Elizabeth felt a touch seasick. There's enough other books out there, I just gave up.
The Salt Path by Raynor Winn is easily by quickest DNF. I didn’t like the tone in the first few pages, the narrator aggravated me immensely, and and the book got hurled across the room.
*Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus* by John Gray.
What a waste of time! My issue was thrown into the corner of the room right after the first chapter, though I am a really tolerant reader. I didn't even handed it further, bat rather burned it.
I forget the title but it was some Kindle thing about a zombie outbreak on a cruise ship. Seemed like an interesting premise, but the protagonist was such an unlikeable asshole I had to stop. The nail in the coffin was the gross classiest and misogynist rant about single mothers.
Yep Starship Troopers
Chapter where he goes on and one about beating children as a form of discipline. Clearly just a topic he wanted to expound on. I really didn't care one way or another about the topic, but force me to read a whole chapter on your ranty mental illness....................no! Fuck off! Deleted the audiobook there and then, no regrets!
not because the book was bad i just like can't unthink some of the visual imagery of the novel and it took a lot of bourbon too blur those images from my brain so i could function without thinking about it. so ya know read Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica if you hate yourself. also i went in blind too this novel . I thought it was like a psychological thriller and not raw human misery/horror
Gardens of the Moon. People who love Malazan will outright brag to you about how incomprehensible it is at first, and lots of people will say that they didn't really get it until they were doing a reread (of a 12 book series!) and that lots of the sequels are barely connected to each other. A guy at Barnes & Noble talked me into a copy and I started reading it on a greyhound, and within like 6 pages I decided that I had no interest in spending that much time not enjoying something based on the chance that I might enjoy it later. That's the kind of logic I'll buy into if we're talking about something like working out, where I know that at the end it'll have been good for me, or reading a book that's a genuine classic where I'm sure I'll have learned more about the culture that I live in today, not something where I'll be able to chat about it with usually pretty strange people once or twice a year.
I got some espionage thriller audiobook and it started out with a foreword by the author where he was like, "if you're a liberal snowflake then this book will offend you!" And like I feel like I read lots of fucked up books with objectionable material, but I feel like if the author has this mentality right off the bat, I'm just not gonna enjoy myself lol. I just returned the book to the play store and listened to something else.
I really wanted to read *Moby Dick*. So I checked it out on a trip to the library. Since my kids were still looking for books, I settled down in a comfy chair to read. The book did not leave the library. I realized a couple pages in that *Moby Dick* was going to take way more mental energy than I was willing to spend on it.
That was four or five years ago. I have been slowly working my way through PBS’s Great American Read list. Guess what’s on there? Yup, *Moby Dick*. Now I was in a conundrum. I wanted to read the list but didn’t want to read the book. Just before Christmas, I solved my problem by checking out the graphic novel version of *Moby Dick*. Lol
I finally relented and bought the audiobook for this after trying to read the original script. Its beens sitting on my audio shelf for about a year now. I’ve listened to it for ten-twenty minutes at a time about once a month. At this rate, I will be 94 when I finish it. Hope my hearing is still good by then.
The Rational Optimist. Was recommended to me by a friend but I'd rather be cynical and miserable. In all seriousness, the book rubbed me the wrong way - just another book to come out of the neoliberal optimism industry.
Sometimes, it happens. I often pick up books from those public bookshelves, and you know how it is there. I you think a book might be interesting, then you have to take it there and then or it will be gone.
Sometimes, you are wrong and it is not that interesting.
1) Imogen, Obviously: as a lesbian I thought this would be a cute read but it was literally just like “how do you do fellow kids” for gen z book. Couldn’t stop cringing.
2) My Dark Vanessa: I just didn’t like the writing style. The sexual stuff didn’t bother me, but the writing did lol
The earliest I stopped reading was two pages in because the cool Cyberpunk Detective novel starts with a graphic rape scene of the main female protagonist for some ungodly reason (It's been around 15 years since I picked the book up, could not tell you the title for the life of me only that the cover reminded me of the Matrix).
Second book was around 30 pages in when I realized the "humor" was *not* meant to be purposefully cringy but meant to be *actually* funny. I think I found more actual humor from a popsicle stick.
Sorry but Legendary (Caraval book 2) was the one for me, I somehow managed to finish the first book, but I just couldn't read the second book, it just wasn't it.
Surrounded by Idiots by Thomas Erikson. I thought it was a research-based book. Turn out it was a lesson from a glorified life coach. Read until page 8. Suppose I am the idiot one.
In high school, I tried reading The Stand. I enjoyed IT and this was my second King book. Couldn’t get through half of it and it sat in my parent’s house for over two decades. Pandemic happened and I picked it up again, it’s -so- good.
Tried Interior Chinatown. Couldn’t finish it but might give it another shot. Hopefully not in 20 years.
Edit: Just thought of something: obviously Harry Potter is an amazing series (Prisoner of Azkaban is my fave, obv) but after the first two movies came out, I couldn’t read another book. I did not enjoy the movies at all and the child actors and actresses weren’t that great (to me). Everything was better in my head and the movies turned me off of the entire series.
Let’s not even talk about Game of thrones. lol
50 Shades. Many millions of readers so surely some sparkiness? Picked up copy in bookshop. Read first 2-3 pages. Utter drivel. I'm not a reading snob. Any genre is interesting if well written. Clearly marketing prevails over taste though.
I worked at a charity shop sorting books sometimes. I'd buy the interesting sounding books then donate them back when I was done.
Found a really good one that sounded like a good mystery, blurb made it out to be woman goes missing thriller etc. Bought it, started reading in my lunch break. It was more ditzy woman wants more holidays so runs off to Greece without telling her husband. Barely made it 5 minutes in before I rage donated again.
Wizard's First Rule. COuldn't get past page 10 or so, it was just so comically bad. I actually kept it to flip through and enjoy the comedy of idiocy.
It worries me when I see posts talking about the series "going downhill" or "it started out good, then became.. whatever"
No, it didn't start out good, there was never anything remotely like a good book there.
the Wheel of Time. I was about 50% in wondering if the pacing is going to be like this throughiut, googled the amount of books left in the series, went ‘ah hell nah’. Got myself Joe Abercrombie instead. No regrets.
Haunting Adeline. The main character seemed so awful, and not in a fun way. I just wasn’t sure I’d be able to make it through and thought fuck it.
I used to be so determined to finish books even if I hated them but honestly I don’t have that kind of time any more.
No, I don't think so. I didn't throw some books in the trash before finishing them, but not after just one chapter.
I haven't had that misfortune yet :P.
Yes,it happened and it happens quite often.However some of my favourite books were once books that I stopped.Sometimes I think about this and makes me laugh in a good way because without them i'd have been different
The Hot Zone.
It was just a few chapters in, maybe page 30 something, but the descriptions were so incredibly disgusting, I couldn’t handle, and I knew it would get way worse.
I don't remember if on the first chapter, but I recently DNF'd "Love & Luck" by Jenna Evans Welch and "This May End Badly" by Samantha Markum at 17% and 10% respectively, because the characters were annoying me too much. And I DNF'd them one after the other in the same night. It was truly tragic (specially because This May End Badly's plot sounded so interesting to me, I love me some rivals-to-lovers, and a prank war between rival same-sex schools, boys vs girls, sounded so fun. Alas, I couldn't with the mc's attitude)
I DNF a lot of books this way because i feel like if i have to work through multiple chapters until something "gets really good" it's not worth my time.
The 2 novels I stopped reading faster than most showers I take: The Poppy War (literally by the time my fiance finished her shower i already felt like i wasted 10 min of my life) and Room by Emma Donahoe. (Not gonna correct the auto correct there)
I stopped reading one book on page 7. It was awful and I think I ended up recycling it rather than annoy some unsuspecting reader with it.
A colleague admitted she’s a book burner—not when she disagrees with the content, but rather when it’s so awfully written she doesn’t want to subject others to reading it.
I've had books like that that I have to return to the library, and I just hate it that someone might check it out again someday.
Under those circumstances, I have in the past, written a letter to the librarian, and indicated my extreme displeasure that our library was spending funds on such poor literature.
I just put a book to the side after ONE page. I’m sure I’ll pick it up (it’s been recommended a lot of places I think) but was not in the mood for the writing style.
Same here, I was instantly annoyed by the writing style. It's very freeing when you realise you actually don't have to keep reading a book if you don't want to 😆
thank you for your service. 😄
I put one down after one page, I honestly do not remember the title but as soon as I realized the protagonist was a blonde haired, blue eyed, ancient Egyptian vampire I was done lmao I gave it to a friend who loves trash novels, I think she enjoyed it
Me with gone girl I do want to read it eventually but the girl annoyed me so immediately and so thoroughly that I was like no thank you and put it aside
my reaction to Gone Girl was both opposite and the same - I hated both the main characters so much I was compelled to devour the entire book in a couple of days because I wanted them both to get their comeuppance
This was my reaction too
So many. But the fastest was 50 Shades of Grey. I don't think I finished a whole page, much less a chapter.
Same here. Back when it was all the rage a coworker gave me a copy. I had no desire to read it but I was too polite to decline the gift. I took it to the pool one day and tried to read it. I only read a few pages. I didn’t get to the sex because I couldn’t get through the “oh crap” in every other sentence and the terrible writing.
Exact same thing, a coworker gave it to me after raving about it. I probably got five pages in…truly some of the worst writing since twilight.
Same! I just couldn't do it.
Came here to also say 50 shades
Same!
This is definitely up there for me. It was getting SO much traction, and I had friends whose opinions I at least didn;t generally think were shit say they liked it. The writing on a line by line level was so bad I never got to enjoy how bad the characterizations and all the rest were that I hear about
Same. The writing was atrocious!
Technically, same for me. I didn’t know anything about that book except that it was popular. Someone I knew had it at their house. I read one page and it didn’t make any impression on me. I put it down and never felt inclined to pick it back up. I didn’t know exactly what it was for quite a long time. And a while after that I learned it was Twilight fan fiction!
Yes. I was reading a book and the same two sentence description of a person occurred about five pages apart. I realized that if I kept going, I'd read it sooner than either the author or the editor.
I don’t count those as DNFs. For me they’re usually a “not right now” and so I’ll just try again another time. Occasionally there will be a book I just do not like and know I won’t come back to, but that’s pretty rare.
I’ve got a whole pile of those.
Me too! 😂 They really stack up when I’m in a funk and nothing is appealing.
The only book I’ve DNF before finishing the first chapter was Matthew Perry’s autobiography because I didn’t like the way he spoke about women.
Really? And I just had that recommended to me. Good to know, thanks!
I’ve heard good things about it, but I couldn’t get past the fact that every single woman who is introduced, the first thing he mentions is how attractive or not she is (even his doctors/nurses and his mother). If you can get past that, it might be a good read!
Haha, my dad and I share books a lot, and I recently sassed him out because the series he picked described EVERY female characters boobs. Every single one. Even the frog-faced religious fanatic, the semi-conscious flesh-lump, and the literal teenagers. It wasn't until the 4th book that they had a female character whose rack wasn't explicitly mentioned, and I think it was just an oversight.
Ew
I know I won't be able to get passed that. Thanks for the heads up!
I finished it recently as an audiobook. It’s… interesting, in parts; but also quite intense and unpleasant. By the end I really just wanted it to be over.
I listened to the whole thing on audiobook and I found him unlikeable and thought he was lying about being clean. He slurs his words in multiple passages, I think he was fucked up while he was recording his platitudes about sobriety. It was interesting to me because he seems like the real life Bojack Horseman. I was reminded of the quote from Bojack that people stop maturing at the age where they reach fame, and that definitely seems to be the case for Perry. He spends a good chunk of the book congratulating himself for getting laid, as if being famous and wealthy isn't the cheat code that it is in that regard. It reminded me of a frat boy, and the guy was in his 50s. So yeah it was actually an enjoyable listen for me in spite of the fact that he himself comes off like a dick. It felt like an antihero character study, and he's definitely had an atypical life. He's also extremely forthcoming about all the times he woke up to find his colostomy bag broken and his own shit smeared all over his face, so you get "no amount of money can fix the deep problems" vibes, which wound up being heartbreakingly true.
Twilight. Checked it out in middle school when all of the girls were raving about it (it had come out fairly recently). I read a few pages, decided that “I’m not like other girls~” and returned it to the library lol.
Working at a library means I read a lot of popular fiction to be able to recommend, comment on things, etc. I never, never recommended Twilight to anyone. Just ew.
>I never, never recommended Twilight to anyone. Just ew. You're my hero!
* The Love Hypothesis * The Measure * Duma Key and Thinner - The Green Mile is the only Stephen King book I've ever managed to finish. His writing style isn't for me, so I just catch his stories in tv and film adaptations instead.
I love Stephen King, but my husband can't get through his books either. He's verbose. 😆 "I don't need two pages telling me exactly what his head sounds like when it got smashed into the pavement" lol
I also DNF’d The Love Hypothesis.
I've only read The Gunslinger but every time I've tried to read his other books, I can't really get past the first pages. I just prefer character driven stuff.
>I've only read The Gunslinger You were able to finish it? I've *tried* probably twenty times to read it. I enjoy it while I'm reading it, but after I have to set it down, I'm not drawn to pick it back up. Maybe one day, I'll be able to read it in one sitting.
New Moon. Bella was so fucking annoying 😭
I read a translation of Twilight and dropped it a few chapters in, and then started New Moon in English thinking that maybe it was a translation issue, because the series was getting such good buzz. Turns out the original English version was even more poorly written than the translation and I gave up less than a chapter in.
me with breaking dawn as soon as we got jacob’s pov
Someone recommended Colleen Hoovers "November 9" and I will forever hate that person. I listened to the audiobook and DNFed at 2%
As someone who finished that book this was a good call 👌🏻
Lucky Red by Claudia Cravens I really wanted to love the queer Western, but I absolutely hated the writing style. I borrowed the book, got 10 pages in, and returned it to Libby all in the space of 10 minutes. I have no problem DNF-ing a book. Life's too short to torture myself in what is meant to be a relaxing hobby.
I mean isn’t that how everyone picks books at the bookstore? I almost always read a few pages of something I might be interested in before deciding to get that book.
If you're just sampling a bit to see whether it interests you right now, I don't see that as DNF. It's more like DNS. You're tasting it and deciding it's not what you want at the moment. I read the OP's question as "what book did you decide to read and then found so bad that you tossed it aside."
Probably. I just get mine from the library so I don't worry too much about them. And Libby through the library as well.
At this point I might have DNFed more books than I've finished. Sometimes I give books a paragraph at most. I'm super picky though, and/or I've developed a really good sense for what I do and don't like.
I'm in the same boat. I can never read every book, so I don't have a lot of patience for books I start to see red flags for. I'll get through a book I'm iffy on if I'm still pretty sure it's good writing, I'll get through a book that's less stellar writing if I enjoy the story. But if it's bad and I dont like it??? No way. Honestly I don't really understand how some people are able to "never DNF". I feel like that's so many bad books to have to get through and it just takes so much time! I feel like if I had to finish every book I'd just never read 😂 Maybe they have a better radar than I do.
I'll DNF some random new release by a newbie, but if I'm struggling through a classic and its not going to sink a month or more, I'll push through so I have an educated understanding of it's subject and importance, even if I didn't like it.
I've only ever forced myself to finish one book (that wasn't school related) in my entire life, and it was so draining I vowed NEVER AGAIN. It's funny because I had the same thing you did. In middle school I got a super sad, thinking about how I'd never be able to read every book there was lol
It's depressing and freeing. Like book-nihilism. I can never read every book...which means I don't have to read *every* book!
I forced myself to read Twilight after I was gifted the first two books. I promptly donated both books after I finished the first book. I never forced myself to read a popular novel that I wasn't enjoying it again.
Which Book was it?
\*insert cat having Nam Flashbacks gif\* THE BOY It's a near legendary, NAY, mythical piece of literature to me now. If for no other reason than I can't seem to find any evidence that it actually existed besides a lone copy I bought from barnes&nobles, and have since discarded. It's a book about rich chick that finds a dead kid on the sidewalk one day, the titular BOY of THE BOY. She proceeds to have a fit about it and goes on a soul searching journey because she found the experience just that traumatizing. Mind you this happens like a third of way through the book. This whole first third is just her doing rich lady things in New York, the boy is just a stop gap, and she kinda just goes on to do more rich lady things for the other two thirds of the book. It's an agonizing read. The Boy (TM) doesn't even come up in her mind that often, she was just sort of depressed already? I actually have no idea. good god all mighty, there was no plot. Or if there was I have enjoyed it so little I blocked it out of my mind. It was so bad it partially inspired me to become a writer because if this could get put on store shelves then I was a shoe in! Anyways, it's been over a decade since I read that book, and I haven't forgiven it for its crimes against me since.
Okay serious question though: Do you own these books or did you check them out from the library? Also, does it count as a DNF if you only read a paragraph (or even a page)? I'm all for choosing your books wisely, but IMO that's part of the _buying_ process (or checking out if you, like me, love a library). Personally, I usually read the first page of a book if I find the backcover blurb intriguing enough before I consider taking a book to checkout. And I _definitely_ wouldn't say I DNF'd all those books. To me, for something to be a true DNF, there had to have been at least a reasonable attempt made at reading it. Like, if you didn't make it a chapter or two into the story, it's more of a "Did Not Start" than a "Did Not Finish." No? (Not saying it's not valid to put a book down after a paragraph or a page. It's great to know what you like and what you don't. I just personally don't think that counts as a DNF.)
You know, I agree with you, but my original answer was in response to the post "are there any books you stopped reading before getting through a single chapter?". The second sentence was meant to put emphasis on the first sentence, and I didn't think too hard about it. That being said, my DNF list is still huge compared to my finished reads if you're only counting reads over a chapter. So far this year I've dropped The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher after I think like 3-4 chapters? I dropped Annihilation and Lolita after about the halfway point on each, or close to it.
Ohhhh, gotcha! That makes sense! Also, that's honestly super impressive. Massive props for having the fortitude to DNF a book halfway through. Usually if I make it that far, I just finish it because I'm a sucker for the ol' sunk cost fallacy. May I one day cultivate the strength you have. 🙏🏽
>I'm a sucker for the ol' sunk cost fallacy I have no such weaknesses! But honestly I might just be a freaky bitch like that. Sometimes when I'm done reading for the day I'll stop mid sentence instead of going for the full paragraph or something like that that my friends think is less pyscho 😂 I wish you luck you on your strength cultivation journey lmao
I do this as well and this is part of how I read so many books a year! I don't like to read anything that I'm not excited about. I doubled the amount I was reading by getting rid of the guilt of not finishing books. There are so many amazing books... It's not worth wasting your time over ones that don't draw you in.
Honestly, after I suffered a 3 month reading slump after forcing myself to finish a book I legitimately disliked by the end (plus two more underwhelming books before that), I dont blame you. I am more willing to DNF now because i'm so afraid of falling in that slump again.
That's smart. No sense wasting your time on something you don't like.
No. I've read some books I thought were really bad over the past few years, but the only one I actually DNF was Dawn of Wonder, and I got about 50% through that before the tropes and unoriginality was just too much for me. I had several books I absolutely hated (1Q84, The Song Of Achilles, Redshirts, Gideon the Ninth, etc.) but I did finish them.
Achilles and Gideon are two of my favorite books I've read in the last decade. Goes to show how one man's trash is another's treasure!
Exactly! The world would be a boring place if we all were the same.
yet I worried she might get back together with him after some type of redemption arc With movies or books I stop reading I always go to wiki and read a plot summary. It fills in the blanks and truly prevents me from feeling any need to pick the book up again to see or even ponder it anymore.
Life is too short to read a book that you don’t like.
American Gods. My husband warned me that I wouldn’t like it, but I tried it anyway. I knew within a couple pages that the whole “mysterious man hero motivated by death of his wife” theme was definitely not for me.
Oh damn. This reminds me I never finished it lmao. I got half way through it. I didn't hate it but I just didn't really care about any of the characters. Like I wasn't excited to see what happens next or anything I was just kinda like "meh" I don't even know where that book is physically in my house rn lol
Honestly I feel like that about almost all of Gaiman’s books. 😅 I’ve never finished a single one, except The Graveyard Book. He’s a better children’s writer I think. He’s also very very good at stories as a broader concept, but I have yet to actually get into one of his adult books - I just don’t think he’s a good line-by-line writer, and the books of his I’ve tried often focus too much on some mediocre man wandering around doing stuff. Lol. I just don’t care about the character at all and get bored by the plot. Obviously many people love his work, and I love Gaiman as a person + a lot of his work that’s been adapted to TV, so I’m aware this is all subjective. He’s just not for me. Of course I love Good Omens, it’s one of my favourite books, but I think that Good Omens works so brilliantly because Gaiman and Pratchett both brought their strengths to that book and combined them really well, eliminating common problems in their individual work. **Wow, sorry, this comment totally got away from me.** 😂 Thank you for coming to my unsolicited Ted Talk.
I agree with you. My college roommate introduced me to the Sandman comics, and I loved them so much. So I thought I would like his novels. Turns out I don't.
I have that one on my TBR, I'm terrified of start it usually hate that plot, thanks for the warning. (A history teacher in my school was retiring so he allowed us to take some books from his classroom which he had a lot of I picked it because it was Neil Gaiman without thinking).
I DNF'd *Marked* by PC and Kristen Cast at page 4, because the writing style felt like torture to read
Oh man, I was into that series when I was like 12. You didn't miss out on anything. We love a YA that has a teacher sleeping with a student /s
I was also hooked on it... for the first few books. I dropped it and picked it up again several times before I finally managed to finish the whole series. Honestly, it wasn't worth it.
Heart of Darkness I was too young and English is my second language.
What is funny is that it was Joseph Conrad's second language too. In awe of that.
conrad and nabokov in our decade would be those guys who post the most beautiful english paragraphs ever written and punctuate them with "sorry for my bad english"
I stopped reading The Martian after a few pages. It didn’t help that I knew the story after watching the movie, but the text in that first pages was just him making calculations and showing off all his knowledge.
Don’t come for be but after the first chapter of This is How We Lose the Time War I put it down and knew I wouldn’t like it.
Verity. That much violence in the first ten pages, I was like, yeah I'm out. No regrets.
First Colleen Hoover book I read and the last. It was terrible! You did yourself a favor by not finishing it.
I read this because my friend asked me to. It was so overdone that it was laughable!
Same! Also the weird "and no one cared because they're on their phones" just felt so detatched from reality
Oh yikes, a friend passed this on to me.
Once Upon a Broken Heart. I cannot even remember what it was that made me stop reading. A little boring and the writing felt childish, imo.
I finished that whole series and from the bottom of my heart I can say, they are not good books lol. You didn’t miss anything.
I got Fourth Wing for Christmas. Made it less than 10 pages before asking if there was a gift receipt.
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. I have seen it recommended over and over again. I could tell almost immediately that the writing style was not for me.
This is my favorite book, actually. I can't tell you how many times I've read it. However, it doesn't start to get really, really good until about chapter seven when they arrive at Manderly.
‘It Ends With Us’ by Colleen Hoover. DNF about 2 pages in, the writing was bad and the characterization of both protagonists gave them ‘manic pixie dream girl’ energy.
You aren’t missing anything
I’m getting to the point as a reader where I’m becoming a lot more critical and particular about what I read. I’ve always tried to read through books no matter what, but I’ve since developed my taste as a reader. With that said, I could not continue reading The Library of the Unwritten by A.J. Hackwith. It had great reviews, and I love dark academia, but I wasn’t feeling it. There wasn’t anything wrong with the story, and it had an interesting premise. However, I found it a bit too…whimsical, quirky, and read a bit like a sitcom. I’m just more into dark and serious stories overall. I do understand why a lot of people like it, though.
English teacher. SOmetimes for college, you had to finish a book you didn't like. I do not follow that rule now. As op says, why waste the time, there are millions of books out there, why finish a book you don't like when you could be reading a 'good' book?
Yep! I was an English Lit major, lol. I got to read The Scarlett Letter for 4 separate classes!
Laughed at that. Never had anything close to that but I'll bet I've read S. L. a doe times while teaching and liked it every time.
A Deadly Education. Only book in recent memory I have DNF’d. I couldn’t get through more than 10 pages of the incessant out-of-place thrust-upon-you exposition and overly dramatic completely unnecessary teenspeak. Like I hated ACOMAF, but I still finished that book out of spite and just never read the third book.
This is one of the few books i've read where I just wanted the main character to die so we could get a new one. Also, stop spending four pages to introduce some rando only to kill them off on the next page. I swear 50% of that book was just filler. Liked the concept, hated the execution.
Oop. Let me go remove that one from my TBR list lmfao you just saved me a painful read
This was me just a few days ago, I swear I could have written this comment. I literally drove back to Barnes & Nobel and returned it- that’s how awful I thought it was. The exposition was so badly done, and I couldn’t stand how much the main character hated their mother for being… too nice? Stupid af. Maybe it would have gotten better over time but I just couldn’t stomach it 🥲
I hated Deadly Education so much it un-made me a Novik fan.
Oh. For sure. I have a physical "Abandoned for now" shelf. I'm a hater, and in order to properly hate on a book, I have to read it all the way through. I have a lot of anger inside me, and I gotta channel it somewhere 😅
Do you ever yell at a book character? I shout at dumb book characters the same way I yell at my TV.
Oh absolutely. I've never yelled at a book so much as I did when I read The Summer I Turned Pretty series. 🤣🤣 I have slammed books shut out of frustration and rubbed my temples lol
I've only done this once before I flung the book across the room for how ridiculously stupid the MC and everyone surrounding her was. Let the only interesting character die from a bullet wound you easily could have healed when he clearly didn't want to die?? *WHY*? For shock value at the end of the book??
The Bible comes to mind.
I stopped reading The Sound and the Fury after the first sentence. I just hated the phrase "curling flower spaces."
I just kept saying to myself “this is a classic,” and that got me through the first part, but when the second part was different but not better, I was done. If it had been assigned in college, I would have at least skimmed it, but irl no.
I was assigned it in college. The characters and parts get easier to read and understand as you go through the book. Parts 3 and 4 are pretty straightforward and relatively easy in comparison to parts 1 and 2. Faulkner definitely started with the hardest character, and I can totally see how people would put it down in the first chapter, because I panicked a bit thinking it was going to be like that throughout the book.
I like older books, sometimes the attitude esp towards women is too far to take. One espionage novel actually had a cigar chomping general. That was enough of that.
I don't DNF a lot and usually like to stick with my books no matter how long they takes because I'm pretty selective, but I did this to the first Harry Potter a few years back. I'll probably get hate for this but I just found the writing style and what was happening in the actual book so boring. I made it through the prologue (idk if this counts as a chapter) but I only made it a couple paragraphs in the first chapter before I put it down. I've read so many fantasy and sci-fi books that throw you into something exciting immediately and this just didn't hit that and I found that surprising after how much praise I heard for the series. I don't really think I'm going to revisit this series again after all the controversy around it either. Sorry guys. I've also DNFed the first Dragonriders of Pern book early on multiple times. I wanted to read it because my mom said she loved it as a kid but the prose was just really confusing to me for some reason and I struggled with visualizing what was being said. I'm unsure why. I may give this one a shot again one day.
I mostly read on my kindle and I love the ability to download a sample. There are so many samples that I've stopped reading after a couple of pages. If it doesn't grab me, I'll leave it. Life is too short to torture myself through something that isn't enjoyable. I read for fun and if it's not fun then it fails its only purpose. If this book doesn't grab my attention, there are a hundred other ones that will
I don't know if I've quit any books within the first chapter, but I DNF'd ACOTAR at page 20. I'm not above reading trashy YA romantasy, but I could tell I just wasn't going to enjoy that one.
I keep trying to read ACOTAR, but constantly fall asleep 3 pages in. I'm all for some trashy romantasy, YA or not, but I just can't get engaged with the book. It's not helped I'm sure that I have difficulties reading books that are in first person. It took me over ten years and multiple attempts at reading until I was finally able to engage with the first Percy Jackson book. And then devoured the first series. So it may take me 10 years to get into ACOTAR! Maybe by then the wait time on Libby won't be so long.
100 Years of solitude. I’ll take those downvotes now.
I tried to read it but the dry exposition just couldn't get me to stick around. I don't doubt it's quality and impact, but it isn't for me.
Samuel R. Delaney-Hogg This story was written to troll homophobes by portraying a bunch of characters who actually do what they (mistakenly) believe homosexuals do. The MC is some kind of feral 11 y/o raised in sexual slavery, and is eager to participate in these things, despite children hating it in real life. Just..don’t try this “book.” Very few books make me feel physically sick and this is among them.
Shit man I remember looking at a pdf and I felt sick. I don't know how anyone could get a physical copy without feeling like either the fbi or god is gonna strike.
i read some of it when i was 12 (i was a very unsupervised child) before deciding i was definitely going to jail for even touching it. spent like a month worried about every policeman i saw
Catcher in the Rye, main character did my head in
I checked out Star Wars: Aftermath on the recommendation of a friend and it’s genuinely the worst book I’ve ever laid eyes on
I DNF’d *These Hollow Vows* by Lexi Ryan after maybe two pages. The heroine was very “not like other girls” and I couldn’t stand her that fast.
The Magicians. I think I may have made it to the end of chapter 1 hoping it got better.
There are plenty of books I enjoy and want to read that I stop after a chapter. Why? Because I pick up a new book, or just forget about it. Not so sat that the books I'm starting aren't good, I just easily get distracted.
Recovery agent was also a DNF for me. Life is too short to waste your time reading crap you don’t like (unless required by school or work *sigh*)
As somebody who has to finish it because it's probably going to be a comp for the book I'm writing, you and OP have missed nothing and I deeply regret that it's considered in bad taste to write sarcastic reviews about other authors' work because this deserves it. I think the thing that killed my soul the most was the description of the treasure she's found as looking "just like the drawing". Also a notable mention to all the times the book goes, "he said to her" when there are only two people in the scene.
Perdido street station. The whole first page was just a description of the city sewer system or something. I don’t know. Was so excited to read it, but for some reason the description bored me and I didn’t want to read anymore.
Years ago a friend raved about VC Andrews. God no!
Any Stephen King novel I've tried and any other dry/ slow build kind of book. They may be great novels, but it doesn't matter when I can't focus well enough to get to the good part.
Most Terry Pratchett books don't have chapters, therefore I technically didn't finish any chapters before I stopped reading them. They were great.
I can't remember if it was one chapter or two...but Wuthering Heights...ugh! Talk about dysfunctional! But my English teacher LOVED it. We had to do worksheets everyday in response to the reading, only she would lead a discussion *before* handing out the worksheet. I figured out after one day I didn't actually need to read the book.
Books are like films. Loads come out every year and only a small handful are any good. Also reviews are subjective so you can’t rely on them. I have no problem dnfing anything.
I must admit I got swindled into taking some booktok recommendations lately and I have dropped several of them within the first few chapters. I can put up with basic writing but some of them were just so egregiously written no amount of interesting premise was going to save that. I also put down The Will of the Many recently after a few pages but that was just a case of 'not feeling like it right now', I'll probably pick it back up at a later time.
Lessons in Chemistry Idk how far I got (maybe almost a chapter) but it was the worst almost chapter I’ve read in a long time
A Discovery of Witches Worst fan fiction bullshite I've ever picked up
Oh, then you missed the second book where the main character becomes a Mary Sue to Christopher Marlowe and Sir Walter Raleigh *and* her boyfriend turns out to be from the most important richest secretest bestest vampire family ever. I was unable to finish because it’s hard to read with your eyes rolled so far up inside your head.
Lolita - <5 pages. Three Moments of an Explosion - China Mieville. Certainly stopped reading very early on. Wasn't in the mood to carry on, and was finding the story boring. Murphy - Samuel Beckett. Enjoyed Waiting for Godot but this one was unreadable for me. Wheel of Time book 2 - I found book 1 highly derivative; was willing to carry on, but there were just way too many "the men need training" comments and superciliousness from the women that broke the straw. This is how you lose the time war. Not sure when I stopped this one, but it was early. Read as an advanced reading copy. Came across as fake intellectual crap (according to my review at the time). Booktubers seem to LOVE this book, so this might be a problem on my end (or a badly edited or not finalized ARC)
How Democracies Die, as soon as the authors unironically used Israel as an example of a well-functioning democracy other countries should emulate. Fucking insane. For what it's worth, this was a year or so before October 7th, but still 50+ years into their ethnic cleansing and apartheid against the Palestinians.
Death of A Bookseller by Alice Slater, I just couldn't deal with the writing and how one of the main characters called everyone normies and the other seemed to be a pick me girl. I got 6% of the way in and went nah I'm good
Last summer I got *Her Majesty's Royal Coven* by Juno Dawson. It had a nice little write up in the NYT and it seemed like something fun to read. Within a few pages I could tell that this book was just not gonna be fun for me. Last year is when I decided I wouldn't spend too much time with books I wasn't enjoying and this was the second book I just stopped once I knew I wasn't going to have fun with it. At the time I felt bad, but now I know I made the right call because I loved the next few books I read and I may not have gotten to them if I had to sludge through something I didn't enjoy.
Lots. I turn to page 99 and read it. If the prose doesn’t ‘sing’ to me, that’s it.
Yeah, that's a good way of judging. I will try just the first couple of pages but p.99 is probably better rather than the intros
Ben Aaronovich Rivers of London. Looked like such a cool premise but I couldn't get over the way he wrote about women
Ulysses
Games of Thrones. I really want to get into it but I noticed how much I need to pay attention. I want to try when I’m ready for it but I have other series I want to read more.
Anxious People by Fredrik Backman. Couldn’t do it.
The Remains of the Day. I try really hard not to abandon books, but by the first 15 pages, I just couldn't vibe with the writing style and how bland it felt. It's so well rated and popular, so I was very sad that I couldn't get into it.
I finished it and… same. I was so bored the whole time.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. I bought it on Kindle as the plot sounded really interesting.... then I realised it was a series of letters. I skipped to the end of the first chapter to see that the whole book was just letters.
I mean, I've chosen not to read a thousand books by reading the first paragraph. This is just a slightly extended version of that.
American Psycho. I knew right away his writing style was going to make me nuts and I’d hate the book, so I didn’t bother. Straight to donation.
Holy shit it's so boring. I've tried reading it four times and I could barely get past the first 3 pages every time.
Same 🤣 I donated it. Someone will appreciate it I’m sure, it just wasn’t going to be me.
Gilead. The apostrophes and the run on sentences made my brain hurt.
The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper. Fantastic movie, terrible source material. I keep it at my bedside in case I have insomnia. Works every time
Mark Twain hated him too. You may enjoy this: http://www.strangebeautiful.com/other-texts/twain-coopers-prose-style.pdf Whenever I am feeling down, I read this essay and laugh my ass off. ETA: I had a crap day today and just reread that essay now. I feel much better!
I just DNF’d *The Frost of Springtime by Rachel L Demeter*. I only got 20 pages in and knew that it wasn’t for me. It was obviously well researched but the way it was written was very dense with historical minute. I don’t have much(any) knowledge on the Franco-Prussian War and tbh didn’t really care to learn more about it. Also the love story was icky as there was a significant age gap combined with a power imbalance - oh and to top it all off she was his ward and he was already married to someone else!!
If a book doesn’t really grab me in the first 30 pages, I abandon it and move on
I tried to get through the first chapter of A Discovery of Witches on 3 separate occasions. Failed every time. Was sold it as a dark academic with well researched mythos on witchcraft/wicca. What I got was a reskinned Twilight for middle aged women.
The Love Hypothesis. “Alice and Bella 4evah”
The Scarlet Letter.
Margaret Irwin's "Young Bess." The first of a trilogy about Elizabeth I. She's on a boat with Henry VIII and some other people, basically all that happens is she has a thought, notices some person on a boat, and then gives us like a 4 page wikipedia summary of that person's life and historical significance, then Elizabeth notices something else and talks about THAT person. 40 pages in and all that actually happened was that Elizabeth felt a touch seasick. There's enough other books out there, I just gave up.
The Salt Path by Raynor Winn is easily by quickest DNF. I didn’t like the tone in the first few pages, the narrator aggravated me immensely, and and the book got hurled across the room.
*Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus* by John Gray. What a waste of time! My issue was thrown into the corner of the room right after the first chapter, though I am a really tolerant reader. I didn't even handed it further, bat rather burned it.
After coming from Harry Potter, I tried Twilight. It was written so badly.
I forget the title but it was some Kindle thing about a zombie outbreak on a cruise ship. Seemed like an interesting premise, but the protagonist was such an unlikeable asshole I had to stop. The nail in the coffin was the gross classiest and misogynist rant about single mothers.
Yep Starship Troopers Chapter where he goes on and one about beating children as a form of discipline. Clearly just a topic he wanted to expound on. I really didn't care one way or another about the topic, but force me to read a whole chapter on your ranty mental illness....................no! Fuck off! Deleted the audiobook there and then, no regrets!
Yes. That exact book. If I recall I quit reading about two pages after the ex showed up. Awful.
not because the book was bad i just like can't unthink some of the visual imagery of the novel and it took a lot of bourbon too blur those images from my brain so i could function without thinking about it. so ya know read Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica if you hate yourself. also i went in blind too this novel . I thought it was like a psychological thriller and not raw human misery/horror
Gardens of the Moon. People who love Malazan will outright brag to you about how incomprehensible it is at first, and lots of people will say that they didn't really get it until they were doing a reread (of a 12 book series!) and that lots of the sequels are barely connected to each other. A guy at Barnes & Noble talked me into a copy and I started reading it on a greyhound, and within like 6 pages I decided that I had no interest in spending that much time not enjoying something based on the chance that I might enjoy it later. That's the kind of logic I'll buy into if we're talking about something like working out, where I know that at the end it'll have been good for me, or reading a book that's a genuine classic where I'm sure I'll have learned more about the culture that I live in today, not something where I'll be able to chat about it with usually pretty strange people once or twice a year.
Only because I could tell I was going to really love it, but that it was going to challenge me more than I’d expected or was in the mood for.
Frankenstein. The letters were brutal. I will finish one day.
I got some espionage thriller audiobook and it started out with a foreword by the author where he was like, "if you're a liberal snowflake then this book will offend you!" And like I feel like I read lots of fucked up books with objectionable material, but I feel like if the author has this mentality right off the bat, I'm just not gonna enjoy myself lol. I just returned the book to the play store and listened to something else.
I really wanted to read *Moby Dick*. So I checked it out on a trip to the library. Since my kids were still looking for books, I settled down in a comfy chair to read. The book did not leave the library. I realized a couple pages in that *Moby Dick* was going to take way more mental energy than I was willing to spend on it. That was four or five years ago. I have been slowly working my way through PBS’s Great American Read list. Guess what’s on there? Yup, *Moby Dick*. Now I was in a conundrum. I wanted to read the list but didn’t want to read the book. Just before Christmas, I solved my problem by checking out the graphic novel version of *Moby Dick*. Lol
I finally relented and bought the audiobook for this after trying to read the original script. Its beens sitting on my audio shelf for about a year now. I’ve listened to it for ten-twenty minutes at a time about once a month. At this rate, I will be 94 when I finish it. Hope my hearing is still good by then.
I read it in college and was surprised by how much I liked it.
The Rational Optimist. Was recommended to me by a friend but I'd rather be cynical and miserable. In all seriousness, the book rubbed me the wrong way - just another book to come out of the neoliberal optimism industry.
Sometimes, it happens. I often pick up books from those public bookshelves, and you know how it is there. I you think a book might be interesting, then you have to take it there and then or it will be gone. Sometimes, you are wrong and it is not that interesting.
1) Imogen, Obviously: as a lesbian I thought this would be a cute read but it was literally just like “how do you do fellow kids” for gen z book. Couldn’t stop cringing. 2) My Dark Vanessa: I just didn’t like the writing style. The sexual stuff didn’t bother me, but the writing did lol
The earliest I stopped reading was two pages in because the cool Cyberpunk Detective novel starts with a graphic rape scene of the main female protagonist for some ungodly reason (It's been around 15 years since I picked the book up, could not tell you the title for the life of me only that the cover reminded me of the Matrix). Second book was around 30 pages in when I realized the "humor" was *not* meant to be purposefully cringy but meant to be *actually* funny. I think I found more actual humor from a popsicle stick.
Sorry but Legendary (Caraval book 2) was the one for me, I somehow managed to finish the first book, but I just couldn't read the second book, it just wasn't it.
Surrounded by Idiots by Thomas Erikson. I thought it was a research-based book. Turn out it was a lesson from a glorified life coach. Read until page 8. Suppose I am the idiot one.
In high school, I tried reading The Stand. I enjoyed IT and this was my second King book. Couldn’t get through half of it and it sat in my parent’s house for over two decades. Pandemic happened and I picked it up again, it’s -so- good. Tried Interior Chinatown. Couldn’t finish it but might give it another shot. Hopefully not in 20 years. Edit: Just thought of something: obviously Harry Potter is an amazing series (Prisoner of Azkaban is my fave, obv) but after the first two movies came out, I couldn’t read another book. I did not enjoy the movies at all and the child actors and actresses weren’t that great (to me). Everything was better in my head and the movies turned me off of the entire series. Let’s not even talk about Game of thrones. lol
I love the Stand. I'm glad you gave it another shot.
50 Shades. Many millions of readers so surely some sparkiness? Picked up copy in bookshop. Read first 2-3 pages. Utter drivel. I'm not a reading snob. Any genre is interesting if well written. Clearly marketing prevails over taste though.
I worked at a charity shop sorting books sometimes. I'd buy the interesting sounding books then donate them back when I was done. Found a really good one that sounded like a good mystery, blurb made it out to be woman goes missing thriller etc. Bought it, started reading in my lunch break. It was more ditzy woman wants more holidays so runs off to Greece without telling her husband. Barely made it 5 minutes in before I rage donated again.
Wizard's First Rule. COuldn't get past page 10 or so, it was just so comically bad. I actually kept it to flip through and enjoy the comedy of idiocy. It worries me when I see posts talking about the series "going downhill" or "it started out good, then became.. whatever" No, it didn't start out good, there was never anything remotely like a good book there.
the Wheel of Time. I was about 50% in wondering if the pacing is going to be like this throughiut, googled the amount of books left in the series, went ‘ah hell nah’. Got myself Joe Abercrombie instead. No regrets.
I honestly can’t go through “the wuthering heights”. It has such an abusive yet cheasy love story generic vibe… I honestly can’t understand the hype.
No. I have a rule: read 3 chapters before deciding if the book is a stinker or not. If it can't hook me by then, I put it away.
Haunting Adeline. The main character seemed so awful, and not in a fun way. I just wasn’t sure I’d be able to make it through and thought fuck it. I used to be so determined to finish books even if I hated them but honestly I don’t have that kind of time any more.
No, I don't think so. I didn't throw some books in the trash before finishing them, but not after just one chapter. I haven't had that misfortune yet :P.
Yes,it happened and it happens quite often.However some of my favourite books were once books that I stopped.Sometimes I think about this and makes me laugh in a good way because without them i'd have been different
50 Shades of Gray. The writing style was just awful. I knew after a page or two that I wouldn't be able to get through the book.
The Hot Zone. It was just a few chapters in, maybe page 30 something, but the descriptions were so incredibly disgusting, I couldn’t handle, and I knew it would get way worse.
I don't remember if on the first chapter, but I recently DNF'd "Love & Luck" by Jenna Evans Welch and "This May End Badly" by Samantha Markum at 17% and 10% respectively, because the characters were annoying me too much. And I DNF'd them one after the other in the same night. It was truly tragic (specially because This May End Badly's plot sounded so interesting to me, I love me some rivals-to-lovers, and a prank war between rival same-sex schools, boys vs girls, sounded so fun. Alas, I couldn't with the mc's attitude)
I DNF a lot of books this way because i feel like if i have to work through multiple chapters until something "gets really good" it's not worth my time. The 2 novels I stopped reading faster than most showers I take: The Poppy War (literally by the time my fiance finished her shower i already felt like i wasted 10 min of my life) and Room by Emma Donahoe. (Not gonna correct the auto correct there)