What makes you give up on a book?

[SoSaidTheSwan]

If you DNF books, what type of things make you give up on them?

I'm reading, or was reading, The Dumb House by John Burnside. I've waited years to get a copy but I just can't finish it. I knew that it was going to be dark and disturbing but it's even more so than I anticipated. I think as I'm getting older, I'm becoming more sensitive and struggling to read details of graphic cruelty, especially to women and children, in fiction. Animal cruelty is a definite no.

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.

What things make you stop reading a book?

@MadMadMadamMim - I am with you there - I used to plough through a book , but now I think - life is too short to read bad dialogue , dreadful scenes of cruelty, poor plots - so I stop - I think is was circa C17th when there were just too many books in English to read in any one person's lifetime , so move on to another.

@SammyScrounge - let us hope that scene was not written by a qualified doctor

I gave up on a Dawn French book because it was so badly written. I nearly gave up on the latest Marion Keyes due to unnecessary descriptions of the designer clothes they were wearing (which I also felt the characters would not have been able to afford).

I think they do the "she lifted the buttery soft leather jacket up from the velvet cushion, swing it on, scooped her freshly blow-dried hair out from the collar, lifted her chin defiantly and left the farrow and ball painted room" nonsense to get the word count up "she put on her coat and left the room".

When the main character is not easy to warm to.
When they use improbable dialogue.
When the story doesn't ring true.
When there is abuse going on.

I'm finding it increasingly difficult to finish books these days. So much nonsense is published.

@hopeishere lmao that is so true. Really drag it out just to describe a simple scene.

When an author uses speech and phrases that are wildly out of sync with the setting.

Recently I had to stop reading a book about two Jewish girls hiding in an attic during the war when one turned to the other and said,

"Remember when being Jewish wasn't even a thing?

😂

Internalised misogyny

Sexism, I see it everywhere as I get older

Over-wrought writing

Anything that tries to spoon feed political or ideological viewpoints to me

Characters that bore me

My lack of attention span (since the invention of smartphones)!

A plot or writing style that isn't engaging.

Books where the dialogue is crap and doesn't ring true.
Books where the author has made the main character a total doormat , instead of standing up to her sister / old friend , she goes along with her demands for far too long. (I've come across a couple of chicklit books like that, )

If it’s the bit I think you mean…dh read The Road when I was heavily pregnant and told me about it - thanks dh! I have never read it though - too bleak for me.

Dh didn’t finish Doctor Sleep because he found it too disturbing, so on that basis I guess he thought it was worse too!

I stop if I’m not enjoying something now - used to try and finish things. I quite often lose interest towards the end, even if I like the book, I seem to run out of patience and often find endings disappointing.

Yes yes to doormat characters! Totally off putting! I refuse to read about them. And yes long tedious descriptions of irrelevant shit.

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.

Too much bad language. I find it totally unnecessary.

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

“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 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.

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 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.

😁 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'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.