You wanted to read the book, you were excited to crack it open, you came into it with good faith and anticipation… but you ended up dnf-ing it. Which book and why?

Mine was The Maid by Nita Prose. It was for my book club and looked like a fun murder mystery. Instead I got instant manic-pixie-dream-neurodivergent-girl vibes, and I noped out before the crime scene was even found.

  • blmatthews@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    I’ve tried to read CJ Cherryh’s Faded Sun books multiple times and don’t make it more than a few pages in the first one each time. Don’t know why, they seem like the types of books I would like.

  • SmalTroublemaker@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    Fighting Destiny by Amelia Hutchins. It was sold to me as a urban high fantasy with hints of romance and a touch of spice. But its just low budget porn written in the style of a five year old. I kid you not. As soon as I saw the way yhr paragraphs looked I wanted to put the book down, but thought “you never know, can be good anyway”. It was not. The description of the MC girl is written from the perspective of her self and its highly objectifying in a way that was so cringe and almost like a teen boy’s bad fanfic of a woman. The story is nonsense. If Marry Sue was combined with a pornstar.

    I skipped to a random section of the book in my frustration to see if it got better. Two chapters of nothing but poorly written smut. And I dont mean “sex scene, plot, sex scene, plot, etc” But I mean the same session going on for two chapters. I banished that book to the depths of my book shelves and swore to never listen to a recomendation from good reads again.

    Rant over <3

  • Yuki-Mochi@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    the shadows between us,the scene right in start,nope never closed a book that hard before,needed a good fictional book that day and i think it just really peeved me 💀😭

  • superyelloduck@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    Didn’t finish Chapter 1 of The Shadow Rising by Robert Jordan. It serves a lot as a recap, and I got stressed out about the female slaves from an earlier book. I’ll get back to it, but there was no way I could read it at the time. For some reason, that storyline really freaks me out.

  • Special_Outside2306@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    Honestly? I’ll DNF if the author includes a playlist at the beginning of the book. For some reason this is getting increasingly common these days, and 99% of the time it’s followed by some of the worst writing I’ve ever seen.

  • naturefairy99@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    lies we sing to the sea by sarah underwood

    dnf-ed at like 15% or less – would’ve dnf-ed at around 5% but it was too late to return it and so i tried so hard to push through and not waste my money.

    turns out, the author admitted in an interview to doing almost no research at all towards her novel, as well as revealing that she’d read no ancient greek literature-- not even the iliad or the odyssey… and yeah, we can tell.

    i am very lenient when it comes to historical fiction. i’m quite happy to willfully ignore small mistakes for the sake of a good book, but this was not a good book.

    i don’t expect authors to know absolutely everything, but some of the mistakes here were laughable-- and also incredibly stupid, considering you can very easily google the answer? for instance, did coffee exist in ancient greece? no ! did ouzo exist in ancient greece ? nope, not that either !

    in one part, the main character says that in the myths she grew up on, the women did nothing at all… wrong ! wrong ! and wrong ! the author is only assuming this because of the old setting, but if she had, indeed, done any research at all, she’d know this was wrong.

    the writing is awful, the character is insufferable, and the dialogue is contrived and unrealistic. it reads like straight up fanfiction of ancient greece, except the author hasn’t read a single thing about ancient greece.

    one of the worst books i’ve read all year. big 0/5 stars.

  • badaboopp@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    any kindle unlimited dark romance recommended on BookTok. They’re all just soo cringey to me

  • reggiesnap@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    SAME! Usually I try to give it at least 100 pages, but The Maid was DNF after about 20.

  • SteinGuin@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    Catch 22 by Joseph Heller. I know it’s a beloved classic and highly regarded but I knew after a few pages the author’s sense of humour was going to irritate the shit out of me. You can’t please of all the people all of the time and no doubt there’s stuff I love that others think is woeful.

  • HumanTea@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    The kaiju preservation society. I loved the name of the book, the premise and the start of the book. Then it got progressively worse by the page. Halfway through and all the characters felt like they were caricatures of each other and I really didn’t care what was going to happen it to whom. Stopped forcing myself to read once I realized I was just waiting for it to end.

  • bondfall007@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    Wizard’s first rule. Heard a lot of good things about the series, read the first three pages and the vibes were wrong. The prose was bleh, it wasn’t hooking me, i just knew it wasn’t right. One of the only times I’ve returned a book.