Spotted on Dear Author today: to DNF or not to DNF

[annathepiper]

Dear Author pointed at this article today, in which the article writer admonishes people who bail on a book before finishing it. I do not agree with the article, though I’ll give its author props for a cogently written argument.

As you all know, Internets, I am a voracious reader–voracious enough that I’ve started reading books in a whole extra language, for fuck’s sake. I read on the bus. I read at lunch. I read while waiting in lines for stuff. I read print. I read ebooks. I read on my phone. I read on ereaders. If there’s a newspaper lying around and I have nothing else to read, I’ll read that. Hell, if there’s something suitably interesting on it, I’ll read the back of a cereal box.

So trust me when I tell you that 999 times out of a thousand, if I commit to starting a book, chances are very high that I will finish it. If I pick up a book in the first place, I’ve already done my due diligence–I’ve read reviews of it, I’ve checked out its ratings, I’ve probably even read sample chapters. Something about the book has piqued my interest and made me think, okay yeah, this is possibly a book with which I will be happy to entertain myself for a few hours.

But every so often, I will DNF a book. (That’s Did Not Finish, for those of you who aren’t familiar with the acronym.)

And when I do, it’s typically because something in it has actively pissed me off. Crappy writing isn’t usually enough by itself to make me do that–though I’ve found that if I have too many reactions of “no no no YOU’RE WRITING IT WRONG”, I’ll bail. More often than not, though, it’s because something in the storyline has pissed me off. Usually, a character that does something that makes me want to climb into the book and punch them out of irritation.

As the article I link to points out, sure, it’s possible that a book that does that to me will eventually hand me something awesome that makes up for it pissing me off. But I can think of exactly one example of a book where the writing was compelling enough to make me stick around, despite the fact that I actively loathed every character in the book. And the book in question did not in fact redeem itself in my experience.

So I don’t honestly see the point of sticking around to finish a book that irritates me. That’s tantamount to saying “gosh, hitting myself on the head with this hammer really hurts! But maybe if I keep at it long enough, it’ll start feeling better!”

Seriously, who has time for that?

What about the rest of you? What makes you bail on reading a book?

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Comments

[vatine]

If the book is in the "that's just wrong!" camp.
If I've read a couple of chapters and still don't care abut any of the characters (or the world).

[mmegaera]

My answer to that is, "Too many books, too little time. Sorry!"

[tibicina]

When I was younger, I used to finish pretty much every book I started. (There are some classics which I tried reading at too young of an age, got about a chapter in and went 'yeah, I can not deal with this prose style anymore' - Les Miserables comes to mind here, as does War and Peace. To be fair to me, I think I was eleven and I had made it through The Foundation Trilogy, The Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit, and The Mists of Avalon, so it's not like I hadn't made it through big, thick, books before.)

Now... I kind of figure if it's not holding my attention enough that I wander away from it or find myself wanting to read something else, I don't have enough time or energy for reading everything I want to as it is. (There are exceptions that I just read through slowly because I can only take so much at once, or for which I have to be in the right mood.)

Well, and if I'm editing something for a friend, of course, I stick with it and read all the way through, but that seems like a given. It's not that I /can't/ stick with reading stuff, just... why should I force myself to do something that I'm really not enjoying as my recreational time. I have plenty of things that I don't enjoy that I could be doing that would be far more useful than reading any given piece of fiction, unless there's some other purpose. (And despite what the author of that article claims, I have /far/ more often found that if I am being annoyed or bored by a book, I will continue to be annoyed or bored by a book for the entire rest of the book. It's not universal, and I will certainly take 'it gets slow in the middle, but push on because it picks up again' from friends into account, but seriously... what kind of puritanical 'We must suffer for our enjoyment' is this attitude about?)

As the writer, part of their job is to /keep me engaged and entertained and not wanting to throw the book across the room/. It is decidedly not /my/ job to make up for the lack of ability to do any of that on the part of an author. (with the possible exceptions being a) I am editing, b) it is a friend's book, and c) I have, for whatever reason, been tasked with adapting or reviewing the book. If none of those are the case and no one is compensating me for reading it, I really think this falls under 'Get off your moral high horse. You can do whatever you want with your spare/recreational/free time, but do not presume to tell me what I should be doing with mine, you sanctimonious jerk.' (And I really would have minded the article much less if it didn't have that obnoxiously sanctimonious 'I am a much better person than you people who don't finish books' thing going on all through it.)

[prettyshrub.livejournal.com]

I don't finish books if I hate the main character, find the book boring and sometimes if I simply can't get into the writing.

Of course, I do try to read books that I feel like I 'should' - because someone I know recommended it, it won some award, it's by an author whose other stuff I like, even if the book blurb doesn't catch my attention.

I find as I get older, though, I'm less inclined to bother with stuff that doesn't seem interesting to me initially.

[annathepiper]

*nodnodnod* Yeah, all our lives are packed enough as it is, it just seems counterproductive to me to make yourself continue a book that doesn't manage to engage you.

[miladygrey.livejournal.com]

I go DNF if:

--I am over 100 pages in and my interest is not piqued by the characters or the plot.

--If a character does something mortally stupid clearly because that's the only way the plot will move forward. See several YA paranormal heroines--"Okay, so this mysterious hot guy has told me that he's dangerous, I should stay away from him at all costs, and has been consistently rude and sometimes violent...I should totally meet him at midnight in the abandoned house!"

--If it's an historical setting with anachronistic language/sensibilities. Nothing throws me out of an allegedly medieval setting than having someone say "Oh yes, Sir Beefcake is quite a hot hunk of man" or "Milady, get over yourself."

[annathepiper]

Mortal character stupidity has been known to make me punt on a book, yeah.

Anachronistic language doesn't bother me quite as much but it depends a lot upon the language in general. If it's anachronistic language yet still lovely to read, I'm okay with that. But if it's anachronistic language because the author doesn't really have a sense of what the cadences of the period dialogue should actually be like--bah. I think this was actually a contributing factor to the last book I bailed on, come to think of it.