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?

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, not too many

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.

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 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.

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).

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.

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.

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 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.