I DNF'd a book and I feel guilty about it

So this post is going to be something violently different from what I normally do in an effort to add something else into the content I make when it comes to books. I do want to continue talking about books – truthfully, my content is more selfish than anything else, so that I have a record, not just on my laptop, about what I thought on books I’ve read so that I can revisit them for myself, and also just get my thoughts out of my head.

But yes, today I’m talking about the fact that I DNF’d a book, and how that has made me feel. Shockingly, from the title, you can tell that it’s not good. Now I’m not a DNF-er when it comes to books. You can probably tell with the number of books I’ve posted about simply enough. So long as a book isn’t genuinely upsetting or offensive or really bad, I’ll stick with it. It’s something I’ve mentioned in a bunch of the posts that I’ve made where there are books I’ve read that were just okay or didn’t particularly resonate with me. They’ve been just fine and didn’t stand out. And that’s the thing, I can deal with subjectively mid – a book that I’ve read and once I’ve put it down felt very little towards.

The last book that I can remember DNF-ing, as of me writing this post, was during my master’s degree. For a little context, I did both of my degrees full-time, and both of them were in Creative Writing. My master’s ended up being done over a single year after my bachelor’s. But the issue was that the master’s was so much more serious than the bachelor’s, where it was actually expected of you to have done all of the reading to be able to participate in the seminars and group discussions. Having said all of that, the last book I DNF’d was one of the books I was supposed to have read for one of those discussion groups. I cannot for the life of me remember its name, just that it had a white cover and I think it had something to do with animals. But because I was doing my master’s full time and needing to read everything, I was basically forced to read two entire novels a week which, for a slower reader like me, was hell. And I remember it got to the point towards the end of one of the semesters where I sat on my kitchen floor, crying with one of the books in my hand, Trisha Paytas style, because I was needing to read two novels a week, produce a 500-word book report for one of them, write material to submit for discussion, read other work from the discussion to give feedback on, work sixteen hours a week, and finally, go to my bi-weekly hospital appointments in another city. I want it to be known it was the build-up of all of those things, and the pressure, that led me to DNF-ing a book, simply because I felt like I had no time to read it. I think at the start of my masters, Saturday was the only day of the week where I had nothing that I needed to do. But the book that I recently DNF'd was the first one since that time, probably six years ago, that I’ve DNF'd.

I’m not going to explicitly mention the name of the book that I DNF'd simply because it’s a self-published one that has less than thirty Goodreads ratings as of me writing this section of the post, so clearly it never really made an impression. But I also don’t want to rag on the author – despite what I’m going to say – since I know how difficult it is to write a book, let alone how much effort you need to put in to going any route of publishing, be that traditional or self.

But as for why I DNF'd it. Simply put, the writing was bad. I don’t mean in the sense that one or two grammar or punctuation bits slipped through – something like that, I could forgive, especially since one of my favourite books, When Haru Was Here, misspells “Charli xcx” as “Charlie xcx”. I made it to about page seventy of four-hundred before I DNF'd, which was also the end of chapter six, before I just couldn’t stomach reading any more of it. That sounds like a horrible thing to say, but in those seventy pages that I read, I think every single piece of dialogue was formatted wrong. I know that there are books that take different approaches to dialogue outside of the typical format of: ‘“Hey, there’s some dialogue here,” he said.’ You know, there are some that decide not to use quotation marks for their dialogue and some that use single quotation marks. The issue is that contrary to the example I’ve slapped in above, this book decided to take the: ‘“Hey, there’s some dialogue here.” He said.’ path. It was the capitalisation of the dialogue tags that was done for every piece of dialogue that served as a major part of me giving up on it.

Part of why I felt bad DNF-ing was the fact that I could tell the author cared about and held love for what it was they wrote about. The main character comes to terms with their asexuality as part of the story, and after I DNF'd there was a section at the back where the author was talking about how important the story was to them. That’s what hurt. It was the fact they cared about what they had written, while the whole thing read like a first draft of someone who hasn’t quite learned the formatting rules yet. For as much as they had love for what they were writing, it felt like the care hadn’t been put into the book itself. Why didn’t they try and get someone else to read the book? Someone objective to it that would have been able to tell them the formatting they’d decided to go with was wrong, because it just meant that the author released an extremely poorly crafted book. I think had the book been handed to me and I was told that it was a first draft, I’d have been okay with that. Your first draft, as much as it pains writers to admit, is meant to be bad and messy. For me, personally, the first draft is there for you to slop your idea onto the page so that it at least exists, and then you clean it up through the re-reading, re-drafting, and editing.

I ended up going online and seeing if there were other people who experienced this kind of thing. I presumed there would be, and when I literally just googled “dnfing books”, one of the first results that came up was on r/Books on Reddit and it was a thread that someone had made called “Guilt Over DNFing Books” by user Z3ROGRAV1TY.

They said:

“How the heck do I get over the guilt of putting a book down and not finishing it? If a book is terrible (bad writing, super problematic subject matter, etc.) I have no problem DNFing it, but if I just don't like it I have a harder time. Sometimes I can force myself to get through a book that I'm not enjoying, but other times it feels impossible and I just physically can't make myself keep reading it, but I also don't want to officially DNF it. I feel bad for the book! Like no, I really want to like you, I do!! It's not you, it's me! (but, really, actually, it's you)”.

And in a second paragraph, they ask: “How do I get over the guilt of a DNF? I know, logically, life is short and I shouldn't read books I don't enjoy, but that feels easier said than done!”

This coming from, literally, the second result I found when searching was very validating in showing me that I’m not the only one who feels actual guilt over not finishing a book. Writing is an art form, and a novel is a piece of art in its own right and deserves to be appreciated. But in that, art is subjective. If I think about conventional art, I think my favourites are really dumb. I think of a glasswork called “Woman with Shrimp”, that I ended up actually looking up, and is from the 1930s and was created by Ercole Barovier and is currently in the Chrysler Museum of Art. And you want to know what it is? It is a little glass figure of a woman with a shrimp on her back. I love it. I also really enjoy Two Rats by Van Gogh, because it’s literally just two rats having a snack. Stunning.

But then a reply that Z3ROGRAV1TY received told them, “Life is too short for boring books! If you’re not enjoying reading something (and it’s not for like class or work) then get something else you enjoy. It’s okay to stop reading something that’s is boring, don’t feel bad at all. You can always try again later if you want.”

I think when it comes to be, because I don’t really have a library that’s super accessible to me, or at least a very good one, that ends up leading me to reading the books that I want to read as opposed to finding something at a library. I think if I were to live somewhere more metropolitan or a major city, I’d be more likely to. Because my nearest library is a little community one run solely by volunteers, and I’ll be honest, it’s not going to have the queer books that I enjoy reading in it. I know that for a fact. I feel that it would be more likely to have the kinds of books that you’d see on the shelves in a supermarket book section, or an airport. Stuff that’s been popular and appeals more to the masses. And then when we lead back around to the fact that I have then spent money on buying a book that I think I’m going to enjoy, I think that’s what going to drive me to at least try my best to finish it, even when it's not as good as I want it to be. I do think that’s why I’m more inclined to finish a book that I even think is just okay.

Courtney Jo, on their article “The Readers’ Dilemma: When to DNF Books” said that some of the reasons for actively DNF-ing a book are the writing style, Groundhog Day, not caring or disliking the main character, and the genre. I definitely feel different about the items on this list. The writing style I absolutely agree with. Like I mentioned earlier, in the book I recently DNF'd, it was the writing. Not so much the style, but the quality. You could argue that the choice to format all of the dialogue wrong came under style but oh well. Groundhog Day refers to the concept of the character being stuck in the same experience over and over. I don’t necessarily agree with this one, simply because I have read stuff where characters are, say, stuck in a time loop – which would come under this – but what it comes down to is whether the author does something good with the concept. For me, Robbie Couch’s If I See You Again Tomorrow does the concept exceptionally. But then the final items I do agree with. But even then, I know I’ve read books all the way through where I didn’t really care about the main character, but there was something else that kept me reading. With genre, I definitely struggle with fantasy. Something I’ve said many times is that fantasy, for both books and games, needs a specific vibe to it, but I haven’t yet pinpointed what it is that I mean by that. It’s just something I can feel.

I’ve been struggling to come up with a clever way to finish this, especially when other pieces I’ve read about DNF-ing have often just gone the route of, “Oh, you just have to find what you like then you won’t have to DNF books”. And… yeah? I don’t want to say obviously. But obviously? I don’t know. For me I think the guilt partially comes from knowing the time and effort that goes into writing a book, having done it myself, and the financial aspect and not wanting to waste my own money. But I’ve now sadly realised that doesn’t matter. If something is that bad it’s okay for me to give it up and DNF. My biggest issue, I know, is with my own brain, and I know for a fact I’m going to keep reading those books I think are mid.

Sorry to say I’m not a changed reader.

Bye!