What makes you give up on a book?

Multiple viewpoints/timelines. Boring protagonist/characters (think middle class new mum dining with new neighbours blah blah)
Terrible writing - I couldnt finish the housemaid because the author continually used the word 'freaking' and described every male in her book as 'so hot' she also said 'so sue me' for lusting after god knows who and lets her employer treat her like shit throughout - all character traits I couldn't believe came from a homeless woman who just done a 10 year stretch in prison. Sounded more like a teenage character from a 90s sitcom.

font size is one of the things that's great about a Kindle, you pick your own. 🙂

If a book doesn’t hold my interest, then I don’t continue. Life is too short not to try something more interesting

I know this is an old thread, but it was a good one.
Font size can put me off, especially as I get older. So many of the classics are written with a tiny font.
Also ridiculous anachronisms....I think it was in a Kristen Hannah book set in France during the German occupation in WW2 where the heroine breezily jumps in a car....when petrol would have been severely rationed. It's a silly detail but has obviously stuck in my head!

Life is too short for bad books, right?
I don't like giving up once I've started reading something but the older I'm getting, the more I'm comfortable doing it.

I'm currently 50 pages in Catching the Sun by Tony Parsons. It's been on my book shelf for years having read some of his other work (Man & Boy etc) which I quite enjoyed. But I'm just not feeling it so am going to stop. It's not well written / edited (mistake on the first page), and the plot isn't grabbing my attention. I've debated with myself whether to give up on it as I don't do that easily, but there are so many books I'd like to read, I'm not wasting my time on those I'm not enjoying anymore.

Too many characters and long winded storylines.

I totally agree about fifty shades @MayISuggestSomeThickCutSteakChipsToGoWithThat

The writing was terrible. I made it to the first sex scene and I was very bored. I could not understand the hype. Haven't watched the film yet though

If the first few chapters don't pull me in. I found that with fifty shades of grey. I gave up reading it after the 3rd chapter and spent the rest of the day pissed that I'd wasted my money on it. Yet I enjoyed the film. Then there's other books I could read again and again

I once gave up on a book very early on because Barack Obama had been misspelled. It just broke the spell for me; at that point he was probably the most important and famous man on earth, there's no excuse for the shoddiness!

This with knobs on. (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 gave up on a Dawn French book because it was so badly written.

I gave up on one in which it seemed she was trying to use up the world's paper resources with the ridiculous number of extremely tedious and unnecessary words.

I also gave up on Alan Bennett's autobiography because I had no interest in his masterbating, which seemed to be quite a feature.

Mistakes that an editor should have spotted.

I abandoned Helen Fisher's "Space Hopper" when the main character's husband - a trainee vicar - referred to the "Book of revelations." It's the "Book of Revelation." A vicar-in-training world know that.

I almost abandoned Maggie Shipstead's "Great Circle" after the chapter called "Marian's Fifteenth and Sixteenth Years", detailing her exploits at the age of 15 and 16. Those would have been the sixteenth and seventeenth years of her life - the count starts from birth, not your first birthday.

Zero characterisation, or stereotypical characters. Plot told by dialogue. Unbelievable coincidences. Ridiculously attractive/flawless protagonists. Formulaic plots. Getting off on niche use of language or slang.

Too many adverbs and adjectives. Poor word choices that strongly suggest use of a thesaurus and a lack of understanding of what the words actually mean. And I'm very likely to stop reading a book if a character pads across the room.

That sums up the Crawdads book for me. Yes, it was beautifully written, and I understand why people love it, but the more I read, the less convinced I was.

Irritating main characters. I'm about to give up on The Essex Serpent because of the 'effortlessly beautiful yet tomboyish with an appealing speech impediment' lead character.

I've definitely got a lot less patience reading these days. Which is disappointing. I think lots of books being published aren't great. But everything else competing with reading in my life is fast paced or short lasting; tv, film, social media, consumption of the news etc.

😁 I think I recall reading a D@n Rh0des novel once where a tiny Japanese woman walks to the pub, drinks six pints of bitter and strolls back, none the worse for wear. Ho ho

I get frustrated with books where you can see the end coming from about halfway through chapter 2. You hang on in there anyway just in case there's a massive plot twist right at the end, but nope... I might have been conned into finishing that one, dear author, but I'm going to swerve the rest of your copious output.

Equally frustrating are books with endless red herrings and great long cul de sacs.

I'm not interested in reading a book if it makes me think "Get on with it for Chrissakes!" within the first hundred words.

Poor grammar.
When I don't care about the characters.
When it's just a lot of dull words. I gave up on The Girl on the Train for that reason recently. Life is too short for rubbish books.

I try not to give up on a book but would do so if I couldn't relate to the characters, I have to care about them and wonder what happens next, whether good or bad.

“I'm also starting to give myself permission to give up on a book when I'm not enjoying it though I used to try to force myself to finish.”

Me too. It was quite a relief when I realised I could do this.

Books I’ve given up recently was because it was over descriptive. One example was about some parent and two young kids travelling across America. Every minor detail had a full description. I got really fed up and summed the book up in my mind as ‘are we there yet’.

I agree with the poster above who says that putting on a coat becomes putting on a fabulous, Purple, velvet retro Gucci coat…Chick flick books are the worse for this as every location becomes a dream location, the cake is always perfectly moist and succulent etc. There’s too much use of adverbs.

Yes to too many character, poor writing, etc

I think we all have!🙄According to male fantasists!

Too much bad language. I find it totally unnecessary.

Poor grammar or style. (I edit books for a living and see so much of this in published books, it's astonishing.)
Unconvincing dialogue. (Ditto.)
Excessive description slowing the pace down.
Too much scene-setting at the beginning instead of some sort of compelling thread for me to follow.
A generally slow storyline.
Or if I'm somehow just not 'feeling' the book for some intangible reason.