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?

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 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!

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 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

Too many characters and long winded storylines.

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.

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!

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

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

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.

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

(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.

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 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!

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.

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!

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.

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

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!

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