Guys! My first blog hop!!
What is a blog hop? It’s a group of people who answer the same question so that you can get different perspectives… and find new blogs! The entire month of September, a wonderful group of people have been collaborating and swapping who posts the answers. In this case, the question is: a book you started but never finished. Let’s see what we got…
Next by Michael Crichton. I got up to page 114 before deciding to DNF. I love thrillers, and this one sounds interesting as it delves into the world of genetics but I just couldn’t get into it. I might give it another try in the future though.
The most memorable book I had to DFN this year was Envy by Amanda Robson. Here is my “review” from Goodreads. “This was the disjointed book I have ever read. There were no decent characters to be found.
This line really bothered me…”You pause.You swallow. I watch your Adam’s apple move up and down your pretty throat.” Technically, we have them, but they are not prominent. If so, are they attractive?
Lastly, the fact that the book changed POV, often within the same paragraph, in the same first-person voice, made it impossible to read. This is because the chapters we named after the four principal characters, yet the POV kept changing, so we did not always know who was talking.”
The book I DNF and need to finish some day was Outlander by Diana Gabaldon
I don’t DNF very often… I’ve read some books I regretted by the end, but I pushed through because of sheer obstinacy, and the delusion that somehow it was going to redeem itself at the very end… but often it didn’t.
There are a few titles that come to mind of books I started and then just got so bored with it that I gave up:
The Allan Quartermain Series by H. Rider Haggard–I had read and enjoyed the abridged and illustrated version of King Solomon’s Mines, which was part of this series, so I thought I wanted to read the full version… but no. I got partway through but the story was very much buried under a deluge of menial, trivial, and laborious descriptions. Most memorable was an entire paragraph devoted to a sequence in which a man is up a tree trying to cut down branches and the axe slips and the head ends up floating on the surface of the lake below. Naturally, we are treated to the exact height of the tree, the dimensions of the axe, the physics of how fast and how far it fell, the fact that the characters are so incredulous because the weight and density of the axe head did not lend itself to buoyancy–needless to say, I had enough. There wasn’t enough action and emotion between the minutiae to hold my attention.
The other book that still sits on my shelf with the bookmark still sticking out of it at probably the halfway mark is The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks. I was fascinated by the Shannara Chronicles series on Netflix, so when I saw that book at a book sale I thought I’d dive right into it…. But again, the minutiae got to me, and there was too much of the action and setting I didn’t understand. It didn’t mesh with what I remembered seeing in the TV show, and the story didn’t compel me as much as, say, The Broken Empire did, seeing as both of those functioned under similar settings, with an alternate Earth populated by fantasy creatures and scenarios… so I moved on to better and more exciting novels and that one still remains for whenever I get back around to it out of sheer boredom!
Have you read any of these books? What have you read lately that you DNF (did not finish)?
Stacks & Snacks 