DNF Update 2021

As I was looking back at my book roundup for 2020, I realized that I had promised to make a DNF (Did Not Finish) post...and I definitely did not follow through with that promise. Oops! Well, I'm not going all the way back to 2020 (perish the thought) but I am going to give you all a peek into why I decided to put these 7 books aside in 2021. Writing these mini reviews/explanations really reinforced why it is that I end up setting books aside. If I don't connect with the characters, writing style, or the concept then I can't summon up the energy to care and/or continue with the book. *shrugs*

I really wanted to like All the Little Hopes especially since I don't tend to read a lot of books set in the South (which is weird as I'm Southern myself). But from the start I was thrown by the dialect of the main characters which didn't become more readable as I continued. Added to that, I just didn't feel any connection to the main characters. They felt like one-dimensional caricatures. The storyline was also extremely predictable which I know for some readers is a huge comfort and a plus when reading (like with the Romance genre) but it's not my thing. What made it even more of a disappointment was that I had received this as an ARC (Advanced Reader's Copy) thinking that it would end up being something I could recommend to my patrons. :-/ In the end I got about 1/4 of the way through before I ultimately decided to lay it aside.

I don't even think I made it 50 pages through Big Friendship before I knew that this book was definitely not for me. I had high hopes for this one because I have a long distance bestie and I thought this would be a good buddy read for us. That unfortunately didn't pan out. (Krystle, if you're reading this post you're on your own with this book.) The main issue was the choice of bouncing between using 'we' and 'I' as the authors volleyed back and forth telling their individual and intertwined narratives. It really distanced the writing and I felt zero connection to the authors as a consequence. That made it difficult when trying to put myself in their place and/or trust them enough to take on their "advice". Perhaps it would be have been different if I had been a fan of their podcast Call Your Girlfriend. *shrugs* Whatever the case, I didn't end up finishing this one. 

I picked up Monstrous Affections solely based on the absolutely stunning cover which overrode my better judgment re short story collections. I don't know when I'll learn that short story collections by multiple authors just aren't my jam. :-/ The premise of this one is excellent and I do think this will appeal to readers who like sampling different styles of horror writing...but that's not me I'm sorry to say. I made it nearly halfway through this tome before I finally admitted to myself that I wasn't going to finish it.

When I read a review of Care of Wooden Floors, the impression given by the reviewer was that this was an observational comedy about a man who house sits for a fussy college friend. Through a series of farcical mistakes, he manages to do pretty much the exact opposite of all the things asked of him by the apartment's owner. In actuality, this is a book about an unlikable (and unrelatable) main character who was so blah that the book never really hooked my interest. While the little notes peppered about the apartment by Oskar (the owner) were funny because they were so over the top these were not enough to save the book overall. If your character is as dull as dirt then you'd better draw the reader in with an exceptional storyline or else you lose the reader which this book absolutely did. I only read the first 1/4 of this one.

I kept seeing lots of positive press for Under the Whispering Door and since it explores one of my favorite topics (death) I thought I'd better put it on hold. The writing is done well with lots of descriptive passages and an interesting concept but I didn't really connect with any of the characters. [A/N: When you have a book that talks about the meaning of life (and death) that's a real drawback.] I kept putting it down with no desire to pick it back up again and when I left it sitting on my desk for more than a week I decided it was a no for me. I think this is more of a 'not the right book for me' but would definitely be a good fit for someone else.

Not sure if it was Joe Hill's writing style or what but I just couldn't connect to the stories in Full Throttle. I read 5 of them and thought the best of the lot was about a bookmobile visited by ghosts. [A/N: Since I'm a librarian I may be a bit biased.] I found myself rereading sentences because they just weren't making enough of an impact to linger in my mind. Just not my cup of tea. 

Annoyingly, I ordered The Little Sleep through Interlibrary Loan because I had heard it was a really unique detective story. Ostensibly, the most interesting aspect of the main character is that he is narcoleptic and suffering from delusions but he remained a one-dimensional character that I could not connect to on any level. A large part of the disconnect had to do with the writing style which felt disjointed and untethered from reality and in a hardboiled detective novel was a major turnoff. [A/N: Maybe that was on purpose as the character in himself was all over the place but I didn't enjoy that literary device.]

For those curious about the book covers:

Source: Amazon.com

Source: Amazon.com

Source: Amazon.com

Source: Amazon.com

Source: Amazon.com

Source: Amazon.com

Source: Amazon.com

What I'm currently reading: The Lyrics 1956 to the Present: A-K by Paul McCartney & Paul Muldoon

**If you're interested in buying any of these books or any books really, you can click here. This will re-direct you to AbeBooks which is a site I use all of the time to find used books at an excellent price. A lot of the time I don't even pay for shipping! Full disclosure: I will receive a commission on all sales made through this link. You will not be charged anything additional for my commission. I wouldn't recommend a site that I didn't use and you are under no obligation to purchase anything. :-) **

Dashed expectations and a DNF

I started Single. On Purpose. thinking that it would be a celebration of being single and that it would talk about societal pressures to be in a relationship. I thought (and hoped) it would explore the joys of being on your own and how you can be a complete and happy person without being tied to someone else. I was wrong. While the author does say that being on your own is valuable and meaningful his overall message is that this is only a step toward the ultimate happiness of being in a relationship. And he harps a lot on exercise and weight loss. As someone who has little intention of dating and who is super happy on their own this book felt insulting. Where's the book about being a kick-ass single that doesn't fret about their weight or wearing makeup or having sex? I'm clearly the wrong audience for this book but I'm also super bummed that it wasn't what I thought it would be because that's the book I really wanted to read. 2/10 

[Possible Spoiler: I felt like every bit of advice offered was either something glaringly obvious like 'get more sleep' or 'be happy doing things on your own' or it was bizarrely dangerous like 'go out and have one night stands if you've never done that before' and 'if you encourage your partner to go to therapy there's a better than average chance they will get better and leave you'.]

Source: HarperCollins Publishers

And then there was a wildcard that I picked up at work. The Whiz Mob and the Grenadine Kid by Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis (the dream team behind The Wildwood Chronicles which I enjoyed so much) purported to be a wild romp through Marseille following the adventures of a group of thieving youths. But this book falls short. I got nearly halfway through the book before calling it quits because there was entirely too much focus on the buzzwords of thievery to the detriment of a smoothly flowing story. For instance, when our main character meets the whiz mob he is inundated with a long list of jargon to denote where on a person there might be loot (not the word they use by the way) as well as all of the complicated terminology for their roles in the group. And they kept bandying these words around and I kept being pulled from the story because I was trying to puzzle out what the heck they were referencing. (By the way, this is a middle grade book which either makes me a very slow-witted adult or the kids these days really have surpassed me with their slang.) So that's one I didn't finish and don't intend to continue. 2/10 because at least there's a few illustrations.

Source: Amazon

What I'm currently reading: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab

**If you're interested in buying any of these books or any books really, you can click here. This will re-direct you to AbeBooks which is a site I use all of the time to find used books at an excellent price. A lot of the time I don't even pay for shipping! Full disclosure: I will receive a commission on all sales made through this link. You will not be charged anything additional for my commission. I wouldn't recommend a site that I didn't use and you are under no obligation to purchase anything. :-) ** 

DNF Update 2018

The last time I made a post like this it was April 2017 so I think we're about due an update. I thought I'd take a minute to talk about the books that I started in 2018 (and in the last week which is what inspired this post) but didn't actually finish. Not to be overly melodramatic, but I think it's important to give myself (and you dear reader) the permission to put down a book if you're not enjoying it. School is for pushing through books that may not knock your socks off. Once you're on your own time and reading for pleasure there is absolutely no reason you should continue a book if you don't 100% want to continue reading it.

So let's start with Matt Haig's How to Stop Time. This book was recommended to my by my bestie who probably knows better than most what my taste in literature is and she wasn't wrong with this one. However, I'm a fickle mood reader and when I picked up this book I just wasn't particularly interested in reading about the lives of these characters. The story follows a man named Tom who has a rare ability: he ages at an incredibly slow rate. The reader follows him from his birth up to the present where he is struggling with his centuries old existence and having to keep his secret (while trying to locate his estranged daughter). There's a secret society of those like him that are ruled over by a man who will do everything in his seemingly unlimited powers to keep their secret from being leaked. The issue I had wasn't that I didn't enjoy the narrative or its delivery but that once I put it down I didn't actively seek to pick it back up. (It was also on hold at the library so I didn't have long to languish over it.) I took that as a sign that this was one I'd have to revisit some time in the future. (haha time reference) Progress: I made it to page 127 out of 325.

And then there was Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies which you might recall kept showing up at the end of my posts as my 'currently reading' book of choice. This is a weighty book, ya'll. Jared Diamond's book had been on my list for ages because once upon a time it had been on one of my recommended reading lists for an undergraduate Anthropology class (I majored in that field). I didn't have the time to read it then (it is 425 pages after all) but the topic still intrigued me. Much like the book above I was interested in the subject matter and found no fault with the writing style (other than it being more like a textbook than casual, recreational reading) but it was so dense that I didn't always feel compelled to pick it up in a spare moment. (I also kept falling asleep for some reason.) Progress: I made it to page 290 before I had to concede defeat (and ship it to the next person waiting to read it).

The Sellout by Paul Beatty was an entirely different kettle of fish. Besides being on the bestseller list, it came highly recommended to me by a patron at my branch who felt so strongly about it that she went to the shelf, brought it to me at circulation, and insisted I check it out immediately. I hadn't heard anything about this book before she placed it in my hands despite the praise it had received from the literati of the world. This book is a conundrum to me. It has been touted as an uproariously hilarious satirical take on race and culture in America. I'll agree with the latter part of that statement but I didn't find it funny in the least. In fact, I found that the 'jokes' were not at all to my taste. This is probably due to the amount of books on race and culture I've read over the last year but I just couldn't read this book without feeling thoroughly depressed at what felt almost hyper realistic. Now I made it halfway through this book so I feel like I got the overall gist and flavor of the thing. The narrator (name not revealed beyond the nickname BonBon) lives on a farm in the middle of a Californian ghetto called Dickens where you're more likely to see cows on the side of the road than a white person walking their dog. The book starts with him being called before the Supreme Court on an issue of dragging black people's progress back to the time of slavery...because he has a slave of his own. I don't know what this book was but I do know that I didn't like it and I have no intention of finishing it in the future. Progress: 145 out of 289 pages.

The next two I'm going to pair together because I made the same mistake with both of them. Computers of Star Trek by Lois H. Gresh & Robert E. Weinberg is exactly what it states to be in its title. It examines the various pieces of technology used in the different iterations of Star Trek through the years and compares it to the reality (and future of) technology. The Future Factor: The Five Forces Transforming our Lives and Shaping Human Destiny by Michael G. Zey talks about the advent of social, economic, and technological innovations which have shaped us as a species and how these and others will continue to help us evolve. The problem with both of these books is that they are so outdated that there was little point in me reading beyond page 20 of either of them. Computers of Star Trek was written in 1999 and re-published in 2001 which predates the beginning of Star Trek: Enterprise not to mention the reboot movies or Discovery. It was also written before the first iPod (end of 2001) or the first smartphone that didn't rely on a stylus (2007). Then there's The Future Factor which was written in 2000 but from the first page made reference to events and situations which considering how fast technology changes made this book (and its many references) obsolete. That's the problem with books about the future...once you reach a certain point they hold no relevance or accuracy beyond a certain window of time. Progress: I barely cracked the spine on either of them before I was checking their publication dates.

For those curious about the book covers (which I think tell a story of their own):

Source: Barnes & Noble

Source: Barnes & Noble

Source: Amazon

Source: Book Depository

Source: Amazon

**If you're interested in buying this book or any books really, you can click here or here. The first will re-direct you to AbeBooks and the second will re-direct you to The Book Depository. These are great websites for purchasing books (AbeBooks carries inexpensive used and out-of-print books and The Book Depository ships free everywhere in the world). Full disclosure: I will receive a commission on all sales made by following either of these links. I wouldn't recommend a site that I didn't use and you are under no obligation to purchase anything. :-) **

So many books and so little time

I'd like to talk about a few books that I've picked up and ultimately decided not to finish. For most of our lives, we are told to always finish what we've started. This message is especially hammered into our heads by teachers who tell us that what we read will be used on exams or on papers. I think this is why it has been difficult for me as an adult reader to let go of guilt when I decide that a book isn't right for me. Maybe the book isn't written with me as the reader in mind. Perhaps I had expectations of the book that weren't being met. However, I think the biggest reason why I put down books (and this is what's happened to me recently) is that I wasn't in the mood for them. That's it. There's a chance (pretty slim in some cases) that years down the line I'll grab these books and devour them. There's also the chance that I'll never feel any level of interest in them. And that's okay, ya'll.

The first one really cut me to the quick because I had waited nearly a year for it to become available at the library. The book in question was Justine by Lawrence Durrell (Yes, it is that Lawrence mentioned by Gerald.). It is maybe the most pretentious, misogynstic book I have ever had the displeasure of holding in my hands. I don't care that it was written before these things were called out. Ugh, I hated it. I made it until part 2 and then I rather happily quit reading any further. The second was Watership Down by Richard Adams. This book came highly recommended to me especially in light of how much I enjoyed Moletown which uses animals to discuss social changes in society. I got about 75 pages in and found that I was looking for anything and everything to do except pick it up and read it. There was nothing inherently wrong with the book. The writing was done well, the characters were diverse, and the storyline was unique. I just didn't have any interest whatsoever.

What's always annoying is when you highly anticipate a book and then it falls disappointingly flat. That's what happened with The Terranauts by T.C. Boyle. This promised to be a highly interesting science fiction novel about a group of people who are chosen to conduct an elite ecological experiment. The goal of the experiment is to see if it's possible to recreate these conditions off-planet and survive. I read 150 pages of this hoping that it would turn around from being overly sexualized, inane chatter about the people hoping to be chosen for the experiment. That didn't happen. I wanted high level sci-fi and I got tawdry romance instead. *crying piteously* That leads us to the fourth book and most recent: The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón which was translated by Lucia Graves from the original Spanish. This was another recommended read (these are always the hardest to let go because you feel obligated) and so I really did try quite hard to get through it. As some of you may know, I'm not a fan of explicit sex scenes in books because I don't see their point. In this book, there's one very near to the beginning and it involves an 11 year old. That was the warning bell. The inherent mystery of the book didn't feel overly complicated to me and because the writer kept harping on sex (it seemed overly gratuitous to me) I lost interst very quickly. I don't even think I made it 75 pages in before I ultimately gave up the ghost. (I looked up the synopsis afterward and I was right about the mystery's solution so I don't feel overly guilty about quitting this one to be honest.)

This has been a rather strange reading year thus far for me. I've reached about halfway to my personal reading goal and yet it feels like I haven't read that much. I think a large part of that are these books which I diddle daddle over because ultimately they hold no interest for me. Meanwhile, I'm wasting time with these non-starters when there are literally hundreds of thousands of other books out there just waiting to be enjoyed. That's the key right there. Why feel guilty over a book that doesn't strike your fancy when there are SO many books in existence? The biggest takeaway is to HAVE FUN. I hope you guys are having a great week and I'll be back on Friday with a review of a book that I did enjoy. XD

**If you're interested in buying this book or any books really, you can click here or here. The first will re-direct you to AbeBooks and the second will re-direct you to The Book Depository. These are great websites for purchasing books (AbeBooks carries inexpensive used and out-of-print books and The Book Depository ships free everywhere in the world). Full disclosure: I will receive a commission on all sales made by following either of these links. I wouldn't recommend a site that I didn't use and you are under no obligation to purchase anything. :-) **