I confess, even though it is not yet the end of January there have been a couple of books I have Not Finished, giving up reading them halfway through, or even only a few pages in. This is rare for me and both the books were ones on my kindle, that I bought at some point last year and had not got around to reading precisely because I had bought them when they were on offer, and wasn’t sure I would actually enjoy them.
Usually if I am going to DNF a book I will know within the first few pages, rarely do I give up a book once I am past the first chapter. This is because my usual reason for not finishing books is the writing – the first book I ever didn’t finish on purpose was a novelisation of Sabrina The Teenage Witch when I was eleven on the basis that I thought I could have written it when I was five years younger. It also took me three goes to finish reading The Lord of The Rings because I got annoyed that I couldn’t read the Elvish, but these books were given up on very early on, the books I have DNF’d this year I have given up much later in the story.
If I get past the first few chapters of a book then by that point even if I am not necessarily enjoying the story, the book may still benefit from being reviewed and you shouldn’t review a book you did not finish. After the first few chapters I am always to some extent invested in the story and characters and at the very least want to keep reading just to see whether everything gets resolved, or any of the characters I have decided to like manage to stay alive until the end.
So if you give up a book halfway or even three quarters through, what happened then that didn’t happen in the first few pages? Well, in my case, the reasons don’t seem to change. If the story is not what I expected, or the story doesn’t involve the one character I liked, or I’m halfway through and the story has not yet started. The book I am currently reading, does not seem to be the same as I imagined before I started, and yet this book I am carrying on reading, because there is still the drive that I want to know what happens in the end, and that is of course down to the writing, so maybe in the end that is the only reason I DNF any books. If the writing does not make the story and characters interesting then either nothing will or the writing needs changing.
On the plus side, not finishing books is a means of decluttering your kindle bookshelf or your real bookshelves and you won’t know a book is going to be one you will not finish until you have tried to finish it.
ChristyESWriter 