10 Books I Never Finished

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This week’s prompt is for books I DNF. I almost forgot it’s Tuesday, because I’ve been unwell for 2 days, and so it’s now past 9pm and I’m bashing this one out quickly (so if it’s riddled with typos, that’s why!) with a random smattering of books I’d recorded as “never-finished” in Goodreads over the years.

1. The Maze Runner by James Dashner – Attempted in 2014. I remember that I just couldn’t get on with the writing style, it was a very quick assessment that I couldn’t read it! I probably only got a couple of chapters in.
2. Alice in Zombieland by Gena Showalter – Attempted in 2016. I thought it might be campy fun but it was just terrible.
3. Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan – Attempted in 2018, after watching Season 1 of the Netflix show. Couldn’t get through two chapters, hated the writing style and it was too much masculine wish-fulfilment style sci-fi for me.
4. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins – Attempted 2016. This one is probably shocking… I think I tried to read it on a long train journey and wasn’t vibing with it, ended up buying another book and never went back to it.
5. Elektra by Jennier Saint – Attempted 2023. I got through about three chapters and it was so fucking dull. These Greek myth retellings are not for me.
6. Fevre Dream by George R. R. Martin – Attempted 2013. This is a vampire book, a vampire steamboat book. It was insanely slow with a lot of time spent describing steamboats. Not everything GRRM has written was gold.
7. Dracula by Bram Stoker – Attempted in 2016, IIR right before I visited Whitby. Have you ever tried to actually read Dracula? Those people are insufferable!
8. Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami – Attempted 2013. I just can’t with the intense objectification of the female character.
9. Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks – Attempted 2013. I was really interested in the world, especially the Culture and the Minds, but I hated the main character and the whole male wish-fulfilment vibe, and it was boring. I was surprised because I’ve liked his Literary Fiction.
10. Shadow of the Night (All Souls Trilogy #2) by Deborah Harkness – Attempted 2022. I got a certain pleasure in hate-reading the first book, but that wore off in the second book when I got trapped back in time with only the terrible main characters for company, without any of the bearable side characters, and also the plot was stupid.

I’m a lot better at picking books these days and so I find it’s increasingly rare that I DNF a book. You can see most of these were from 2013-16 where I was really trying out lots of different books!