DNFs

[calissa]

I’m a pretty stubborn reader. I crave completion and always want to know how the story ends. Almost always, anyway. It takes a lot to make me put down a book, but it has happened occasionally. Most recently was The Meeting of the Waters by Caiseal Mor, back in February. This got me thinking about exactly what it was that turns me off a book. So I decided to take a look at the books I’ve not finished and see if they had anything in common.

In the case of The Meeting of the Waters, I just didn’t click with it from the beginning. Over the last few years, I’ve tried to read this book several times but always found the style to be a bit on the melodramatic side for me. I get that it was aiming for epic Celtic saga but it just made me roll my eyes.

The Meeting of the Waters is a prequel and I could tell. It seemed to assume that I would already have an emotional bond to certain characters and therefore made no effort to help me create one. Perhaps that’s fair enough, since time spent doing so would be time wasted for ongoing readers. Maybe. But that lack of connection with the characters coupled with the style was enough to make me put down the book and give away my copy of the trilogy. I think it’s unlikely I’ll pick up work by this author again. 

Moving on to authors I will never again touch with a ten-foot barge pole, Stephen Donaldson is top of the list. I suspect this will also be the case for a few of you. At the beginning of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, the eponymous character is a literal leper reviled by his ex-wife and the rest of modern society. After being hit by a car, he wakes up to find himself in another world where a young woman cures him of his leprosy. Believing the world to be a dream, he repays this young woman by raping her.

It was at this point I put the book down and never picked it up again. Actually, I may have thrown it at the wall. I’m okay with some unlikeable characters but I had zero desire to see such a whiny, entitled, morally repugnant character find his redemption and save the world.

Confession: I put down A Storm of Swords at the Red Wedding. It wasn’t that I particularly cared for the characters who died. Just the opposite, in fact: one of them rather irritated me and I didn’t sufficiently care about any of the others to read on and discover their fate. After all, chances were good they were just going to be killed off anyway.

These three books show that connecting to the characters is super important to me as a reader. Of the three books, A Storm of Swords  had the best chance at that–by the time I put it down, I was already two-and-a-half books into the series. There were characters I thought were at least a little bit interesting, even if there were none I especially liked. What was lacking for me was hope. While I don’t expect characters to come out unscathed, I do want them to become better people for their travails. There wasn’t much hope of that in A Song of Ice and Fire.

Becky Cole has shared some of her deal breakers over at BookRiot and I definitely agree with some of them (though not all).

What about you? What books have you put down? What are your deal breakers?

 

Mirrored from Earl Grey Editing.

Comments

THAT book

[dialecticdreamer]

That's how my family refers to it.

It's the only book I've ever thrown.

Lois Lowry's "The Giver." Because of the toddler "euthanized" for being slow.

Heck, my skin is crawling just typing this!

Re: THAT book

[calissa]

Oh, wow! I can see why that would be on your DNF list.

[moonvoice]

I feel like someone who manages the epic drama of fairy tale / Celtic stories while not sacrificing a deft touch with writing is Juliet Marillier. I only have Caiseal Mor's non-fiction stuff, and I quite like that. But I'm not sure his style would go well with fiction.

I don't know how many universal dealbreakers I have, except say, bigotry against a minority that's not being written in a way to show how wrong or horrible or damaging that is.

I mostly just go off whether I enjoy reading something or not. I have my 25% rule. If I don't get into the story in the first 25%, I put the book down as a DNF.

I definitely rage!quit the ASOIAF series. Otherwise I just have my 25% rule and my 'please don't be an overt awful minority bashing bigot' rule. Everything else is fair game, since I don't like to hem myself in with too many rules.

[calissa]

I really must start reading her longer sagas. She does such excellent work. (And while I think of it, did you see Lynn's post on Prickle Moon?)

Has that universal dealbreaker caused you to put down many books, aside from ASOIAF?

I wonder whether I should institute a 25% rule. However, I always feel obligated to read the entirety of a book if I'm reviewing it--or unless it is appallingly bad. Overall, though, I do think I'm pretty easy to please. And I think your point about not hemming oneself in with too many rules is also a good one.

Huzzah, someone else who rage!quite ASOIAF! I find it kind of strange that everyone else gets so excited about it.

[onewhitecrow]

High five on the Stephen Donaldson front - I mean, I get what he's trying to say about Chosen White Male Quest novels, but no-one needs that long, and The Iron Dream (premise: what if Hitler wrote pulp sci-fi rather than Mein Kamph) did it better. Badly-handled, sidelined or worse, unacknowledged rape will pretty much always get me to put a book down.

I drifted away from ASoIaF when it got too long between North interludes, 'cause those were the fun bits. Tyrion can't carry it all on his own, poor bastard. I'd probably go back if persuaded there would be more dragons later, though.

What else...I get thoroughly pissed off if authors call things other things, like J.K.Rowling's "basilisk" lindwyrm, and on the theme of that household-name Sassenach hack, unrealistic depictions of abusive family life and/or ones that teach that Good Guys are passive and wait for rescue, and only villians fight back are also likely to put me off a book. Sometimes you don't get rescued, J.K.Rowling. *ahem*

Temporally displaced attidudes. I put down The Sea Road about 5/6 through because the narrator just didn't read like a Viking, or anyone who's lived around Scandinavian women...lots of arrow-waving at "but I was a woman [doing X]!" because the author had clearly absorbed the idea of the past as where women did nothing, despite the nigh-equality of Viking society. Also the jumping headfirst into "Savage Indian" stereotyes for the skraelings, which were what I picked up the book for, and...no. There is no reason to think Vikings viewed the natives that way. Their views might have been more distasteful to the modern reader ("No metal weapons? Kill them, take their stuff!"), but an insider narrator shouldn't be a vast exception to their society.

That said, I will read genuinely bad books for entertainment. If it's blatantly and hilariously terrible, it's less likely anyone will take in any harmful content, I suppose.

[calissa]

Tyrion can't carry it all on his own, poor bastard. Well said.

I can see you probably steer clear of great swathes of YA and Urban fantasy with the whole calling things other things bit.

[onewhitecrow]

I don't tend to touch YA at all...barely did even when I was a teenager, but yes, shortcut to making me really angry is to gank the names of (for instance) British/Irish native breeds of fey and slap them on something else rather than writing awesome stories about, say, the Nuckelavee.

Oddly enough China Miéville's eel-merfolk grindylow don't set me off, but I think that's down to the fact that not only do actual grindylow lack a consistent description, but that's very much under the translation convention of secondary world fantasy.

[calissa]

I've not yet tried any of China Mieville's work. Would you recommend him?

[onewhitecrow]

Hell yes. Then again, I'm very biased (unabashedly socialist and politically conscious author, woo! He's a less violent shade of red these days, but just stripping out the usual right-leaning and/or imperialist underpinnings of fantasy and hanging them out for examination makes his works so fresh)...the Bas-Lag books are pretty grim and gritty but astoundingly imaginative, whilst his later sci-fi is mindbending but rather more satisfying.

Probably the best description is his own, when talking about how he dealt with winning the World Fantasy Award, which won him a statue of a dead racist in his study - he turned it to the wall and took great joy in "writing behind Lovecraft's back".

[calissa]

Interesting! I'm not big on grim, but I think I'm going to have to at least give him a go. Anywhere you'd recommend I start?

[onewhitecrow]

Try Perdido Street Station if you think you can get on with the world of Bas-Lag, otherwise Embassytown. That said, you can probably get hold of his short stories somewhere about, which might work as a better taster.

[calissa]

Thank you! My local library has copies of both books.

[lark_ascends]

Okay, getting rid of my copy of that book by Stephen Donaldson that I picked up second hand and have never read.

[calissa]

I'm glad I could help shrink your Mt TBR! Life's too short for books like that.