Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature/meme now hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. The meme was originally the brainchild of The Broke and the Bookish. This week’s topic is BLAH BLAH.
Nine Books I DNF’d
There are plenty of books I set aside because they are wrong for my current mood or even because I have to return them to the library, but I fully intend to return to them someday. (Even if “someday” never comes.) Those I label Hibernating. And then there are the books I label DNF (for “did not finish”)—books that were so badly written, so dry and boring, so depressing, so distasteful, or so out of my comfort zone that at the time I DNF’d them, I had no intention of ever attempting to read them again.
What’s really interesting about this list is how many books are by authors I love, or at least like. Some of my favorite authors are represented here, which just goes to show that no author is going to satisfy a reader every single time. Unlike some readers whose 1-star reviews I have read, I won’t turn against an author just because one of their books wasn’t right for me. I continue to read, reread, and enjoy Laurie R. King, Nora Roberts, Robin McKinley, Anne McCaffrey, and occasionally Eloisa James, whose books you will find on this list.
And I want to be clear: just because I DNF’d a book, that doesn’t mean it was bad, or that it won’t appeal to you. There are things I simply won’t read that other people love. Horror gives me the horrors, for instance, and I tend to avoid dark psychological thrillers, books with a lot of gratuitous and graphic gore and violence, and anything with a truly depressing ending. (And yes, I do peek… which is one reason I don’t end up with a lot of DNFs.) Anyway, I will tell you if a book was, in fact, bad and not simply the wrong book for me.
Spoiler alert: These mini-reviews may contain spoilers.
Alphabetically by title:
Califia’s Daughters, by Leigh Richards (AKA Laurie R. King): I love Laurie King’s Mary Russell novels, and I’m a long-time fantasy/SF afficionado, so I was prepared to really enjoy King’s only foray into fantasy (or perhaps SF.) Unfortunately, for whatever reason, I just couldn’t get into this book. Neither the characters nor the world appealed to me. It is well-written—I can’t imagine any book by King being otherwise!—but it simply never clicked with me. In the end, I did not finish it.
Catalyst, by Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough: I was deeply disappointed in McCaffrey and Scarborough’s Catalyst. I wanted to like it. I enjoyed the barque cats in McCaffrey’s The Rowan and Damia , and looked forward to reading more about them. But Catalyst failed to engage my interest even enough to finish it. And that makes me sad.
The Cobweb Bride, by Vera Nazarian: The writing was beautiful, but I struggled with the horrors inherent in the premise. Death refuses to take people until he gets his “Cobweb Bride,” which leads to a lot of undead people about. I’m sure you can imagine how unpleasant that could be. The book is also very slow-moving, at least in the beginning, and I had trouble connecting with most of the characters. It got some good reviews, but it wasn’t for me.
Deerskin, by Robin McKinley: Deerskin is based on Charles Perreault’s “Donkeyskin” and similar folktales. In McKinley’s retelling, the main character is a young princess whose widowed father, in his obsessive grief and madness, tries to rape/marry her because she looks so much like her mother. She flees, forgetting in her fear both who and what she is. She ends up in a neighboring kingdom and takes a menial job to survive, where she draws the notice of the prince of the realm. When I tried to read McKinley’s retelling, I wasn’t at all familiar with the source material. I really can’t read about sexual assault by family members (not because of personal experience; I just find the whole idea so horrifying.) So when I realized where the book was going, I stopped reading. That was well over 20 years ago—and at the height of my battle with anxiety, which didn’t help. Now that I know the original story and my anxiety is under better control, I might actually try again, because I do love McKinley’s writing, and I’m sure she will handle it well and sensitively. But I suspect I would still have to skip the most difficult sections of the book.
Hidden Riches, by Nora Roberts: I normally love NR’s books, but I just couldn’t continue with this one. It’s dated in some ways that bother me: internalized misogyny in the heroine, a certain amount of sexism in the hero, and the fact that they both smoke. The book also spends too much time in the villain’s head. I might give this book one more try, but in general, I find that some of Roberts’s older books reflect too much the attitudes of their times, in ways I might not have noticed when the book was written but that make me uncomfortable now.
The Icebound Land, by John Flanagan: Technically, I did finish this, the third book in the Ranger’s Apprentice series… but only because I skipped about half of it. I had a hard time with the middle section. (Spoiler alert: it’s because Will ends up addicted to a drug, among other things; addiction is one of the things that I try to avoid reading about, especially in children’s books.) I ended up skipping a lot of that section, which focuses on Will’s and Evanlyn’s enslavement, and picked it up again where they escape their captors, reading from there to the end. I did enjoy the sections about Halt and Horace, though.
Killer in Crinolines, by Duffy Brown: There’s nothing terribly wrong with this cozy mystery, and the main character is likeable enough, but the slangy dialog and unlikely situations weren’t quite my cup of tea; in fact, they grated on my nerves.
The Reluctant Countess, by Eloisa James: I loved the first book in this series, so I was excited for book two. But the hero and his sister ruined it for me. The “hero” looks down on the heroine even as he lusts after her, and thinks she dresses too provocatively. The sister is awful; she hates the heroine and undermines her at every opportunity—and the hero (her guardian as well as her brother) doesn’t tell her to stop, even after he has really fallen for Yasmin. In fact, he keeps the courtship secret so as not to upset his sister. That was pretty much the last straw for me. James is a good writers; I’ll read her other books. But this book? Not for me.
(unknown title by unknown author): Very soon after getting my first e-reader, I downloaded a free self-published paranormal romance (I think) with the face of a black wildcat on the cover. It was terrible. I mean, it was laughably bad. I managed to get through about 4 pages before the truly dreadful writing and complete lack of editing did me in. To be honest, it almost put me off self-published books altogether!
I’m not being coy about the author and title. I truly can’t remember, and I deleted the book from both my e-reader and my Calibre library. I tried Googling to see if I could find it, but no luck. I’m not sure I would have told you, anyway; that would be cruel to the author. I’ll never forget how staggered I was by the abysmal writing and editing, though… and the realization that the author must have been unaware just how bad it was. I really hope that they weren’t too crushed by whatever reviews they got, and that they went on writing and improving their skills. And I hope that if they ever published another book, they made sure to first have it professionally edited, copyedited, and proofread.
Lydia
I’ve DNF’d books from plenty of my favourite authors!
Lydia recently posted…Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Did Not Finish
Anne - Books of My Heart
Interesting lists. Not every book works for every person.
Anne – Books of My Heart recently posted…Two Truths and a Lie by Cory O’Brien @bettermyths.bsky.social @penguinrandomhouse.bsky.social @sophiarose1816
Lark_Bookwyrm
Absolutely. And not every book works at the time you try to read it, either; sometimes you can connect to it years and years later. (Not that it’s a book, but Hamlet is a case in point for me. In my early 20s, I didn’t care for it, despite the fact that I loved Shakespeare generally. It wasn’t until I saw a brilliant performance decades later that I really understood the play.)
Lark@LarkWrites
Putting books into hibernation! lol. I love it. 😀
Lark@LarkWrites recently posted…The Crack in the Lens by Steve Hockensmith
Katherine
I remember the smoking in Hidden Riches and found it very jarring which is a good sign for how far things have come regarding smoking. I haven’t read that cozy mystery but there are times when cozies cross the line into ridiculous.