What makes you give up on a book?

I love Zola - it's the French literary equivalent of Brookside. Loads of awful things happen in succession making it completely unbelievable but also a massive page turner.

I can't stand ridiculous dialogue (looking at you, Dickens) and large waffle that doesn't contribute to the story. I just waded through the Magic Mountain and ended up skipping loads of shite that wasn't part of the story.

But mainly I give up on a book if I nod off within ten minutes of picking it up as I know it will take me so long to get through with all the napping that it's not worth it.

I’m not one of those people who hates books written in the first person, or in the present tense.
But I recently finished a book that started off as being in the third person present tense, but then had some chapters that were in the past tense. By the end pretty much all the chapters were in the past tense, with the occasional one in the present tense. It was really odd.
If an author’s going to choose a tense to write in they need to stick to it. It just gets confusing otherwise! The story was interesting though.

1. Characters I don't care about. I just can't be bothered to learn any more. Similarly, a generally boring story.
2. crime fiction where (any of these) 1) bad guy stalks the cops trying to catch bad guy; 2) bag guy targets the loved ones of cops who are trying to catch bad guy; 3) cops who don't shoot but instead stand around pointing guns at people who are holding guns pointed at other people.
3. Horrible violence happening to little children
4. Convoluted predatory behaviour towards vulnerable people; real violent predators are thick not geniuses.
5. Long descriptive passages but nothing actually happening
6. Anyone full of angst &/or navel gazing. Why would I care?

OTOH, Am pretty sure I'm a pleb who can put up with no end of bad writing if I like the characters.

Magic Pixie Girls who bring themselves up in a swamp and are yet dazzlingly beautiful with good teeth (that Crawdads book) or are locked up in an asylum for most of their life and are dazzlingly beautiful (the disappearance of esme lennox).
Any historical book where the heroine wanders around gathering herbs (laberynth) or has a vigorous 21st century sex life (any Philippa Gregory).

I used to finish every book I read. It was a sort of compulsion. I soon realised what a bad habit that is, however, and have now gone to the opposite extreme. In fact, I hardly finish anything! In the last couple of months I have started and abandoned Middlemarch, Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, Woolf’s Orlando, Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady and Ruskin’s Selected Writings on Art. Every one of them is still sitting on my shelf with a bookmark a third of the way through. I enjoyed them all, and plan to finish them, but I’m constantly distracted by something new. Unfortunately, I’m also a slow reader. Right now I’m reading Forster’s Room with a View, and am going to make myself finish it.

I stopped reading Normal People because Sally Rooney doesn't use quotation marks. Apparently she doesn't "understand the function they perform in a novel"

I found it pretentious and annoying.

I also listen to audiobooks alongside reading them myself. There are certain narrators who I would listen to reading anything, such as Lorelei King. Love her voice.

I have also become someone who will give a book away and not finish it as I have got older.

*too many, not too many

When it's obvious the author is ponderous and has no sense of humour. (It's usually men who write this way.)

Choreographed sex scenes. "He kissed her neck... She ran her hands over... He slid his hand... Her arm went round..." Just so deeply unsexy. You can have just one sentence that can convey the emotion and feeling of a sexual encounter; I don't need every tedious detail of what body part was being touched up.

You many words doing too little.

Lots of humdrum dialogue, even if that's how people speak.

Too many characters introduced with lots of conversations between them all, in the first chapter!

I hate when I carry on with books like that I've no idea who the character is

I stopped reading A Little Life yesterday, and deleted it from my kindle, which was a first. Too much awfulness in the story. Having to work out who was either narrating or being spoken to was irritating but I went with it as a writing style, but the child abuse scenes on top of self harming ones, were too much.
I'm horrified at it's popularity, and that it's been turned into a play which is currently running!

I was really enjoying Lessons in Chemistry until Calvin got killed off quite early on. Haven't picked it up again.

The only book I've ever actually given up on was William Burrough's 'The Naked Lunch' as it was making me slightly queasy!

I have a policy of pressing on but I do find relentless misery very hard - 'A Fine Balance' by Rohinton Mistry and Elias Canetti's 'Auto da Fe' were real slogs as there was just misery and stress piled up on top of one another on and on. Zola's 'Germinal' was similar - I recall it being well written by the end was so bitter and literally torturous. I decided to look up some of his other books recently to see if I might read one, but when I looked at a synopsis 'Therese Raquin' it was even more full of hatred and bitterness.

My inability to read without continually reading the same line several times. I used to be an avid reader but I put this down to my brain becoming too used to devices and reading in short bursts/scrolling for too many years now. One of my customers is a neurosurgeon and we discussed this recently he said he also had the same problem. Modern life is SO worrying!

No plot. I have given up on many books which have won literary prizes because nothing actually happens, and the book consists entirely of annoying characters obsessing about their feelings, and those of other equally annoying characters.

I agree with PP, I always felt the need to finish books whether I was enjoying them or not. But, I have recently given up on 2 books and feel like I now won't hesitate if they're not my thing for whatever reason!
Reasons I gave up were:

Book 1) was about domestic abuse / gaslighting and literally made me feel anxious to read it. I stopped half way through
Book 2) I couldn't stand the main character. Gave it a few chapters and bailed out!

When I fail to care about any of the characters. When there is too little detail given and I have no idea who is who and what is what..

(I'm an editor and all too often find myself gazing aghast at some glaring error and thinking 'how on EARTH did that slip through the net?')

I have a biography of Catherine Howard (died 1542). In it the author, an academic, describes heads of executed traitors being placed on Tower Bridge (built in 1886-1894). And by no means the only thing in that book that made me raise my eyebrows and wonder where the editor was.

Just remembered another one. An Agatha Raisin mystery. Gardener in the churchyard tells her he uses the grass cuttings on his compost heap and gets excellent results. She is horrified, and we the readers are evidently supposed to share in this sentiment. I thought I just couldn't be bothered with people like that.

Also if it starts with a quote from another work I’ll probably give up. In my experience if you quote from another literary text the work will probably not be a shadow as good as that literary text and I will constantly compare them in my head. Same with YA or fantasy novels that start with Latin quotes, quotes from any classical work, or quotes from Shakespeare. It doesn’t make you look ultra clever and deep, all it does is remind me that you aren’t as good as Shakespeare, when I never would have made that comparison without your help.

The first time a woman looks in the mirror and describes their body/appearance in a cringe way I give up. If it starts with a long and dull infodump about the world the story is set in I give up. If it starts with two characters sharing ‘witty’ banter I give up. This isn’t Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I don’t know these people yet. No matter how ‘clever’ they are it will be boring to me since I can’t picture it in my head because I don’t know who they are.

I only realised 15 years later when we listened to the radio adaptation, but I gave up on Lord of the Rings.

Somewhere among the bleak grey stoniness of the bleak grey stones in the bleak grey stony landscape of bleak grey stony Mordor...

Last time I said this S1 (who read it aged 7) rolled his eyes at me and said "mum, it's about half a page!"

Maybe so, but it was the final straw

Apart from that, not very many. I slogged my way through War and Peace but remembered nothing apart from date confusion and name variations. Took three goes at Sense and Sensibility, no idea why, and abandoned Jane Eyre for 30 years, also no idea why.

Oh, (ha) I threw out Bored of the Rings, a supposedly hilarious parody by the Harvard Lampoon which relied heavily on stupid name changes and toilet humour. I was decidedly pissed off that someone had managed to get that published.

Not enjoying it. I was tempted to put "bad writing," but if something is badly written I don't enjoy it, so same thing.

I think it's important to try the classics. I mean to throw yourself in and see what happens. If you make the effort, they always repay you. I have been following Harold Bloom's reading list for years, with mixed results. In some cases, they're just too hard. Some of the greats utterly defeat me. I can't get through Dante's Divine Comedy, for example, or Proust. I also find Joseph Conrad heavy going. Bloom is a huge fan of Walter Pater, the 19th-centruy art critic, but I can barely get through a page.

Then there are great writers I utterly loathe, not because they're difficult, but because I can't stand them as people (Philip Roth, Hemingway). In other cases, I can't explain it. I like the idea of Tolkien, and really want to enjoy his books, but something inside me recoils in disgust.

All my favourite novelists write well: Austen, Dickens, George Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Burgess, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, P G Wodehouse. I also want something life-affirming. Give me D H Lawrence over Cormac McCarthy and Thomas Hardy any day. Humour is important too, and vivid, memorable characters. I've just finished David Copperfield and feel almost bereft at having to say goodbye – the characters are so strong I feel like I know them. Finally, I love good dialogue. Many of my favourite writers (Oscar Wilde, Evelyn Waugh, P G Wodehouse, Anthony Burgess, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Aldous Huxley) are masters of dialogue.

Bad editing and punctuation
No speech marks
Characters talking out of period - I know re-creating period speech is tricky but at least try (see 'bad editing' for not picking up anachronisms).
Tics - I abandoned one book about 30 pages in because all the characters keep saying 'P'raps.' Not even 'perhaps.'