Often on book-reading discussion boards someone will ask about DNF books. Do you have DNF books? What books are DNF for you? Is it even ethical, within the universe of book-reading morality, to DNF a book? Writing is difficult, sacrificial, even bloody, after all. Readers are, in the main, reluctant to disrespect.
The bond between readers and authors is a sacred one and involves obligations. For readers that means giving the author a chance. Maybe a book will start out slowly but reward persistence. Maybe the author has things in mind for their characters, or their plot, or their setting that are a challenge to grasp quickly. Maybe this book is meant for a Specialized Audience, one that will appreciate its idiosyncrasies. But maybe not, and at some point, no matter what has gone wrong, a reader has a right to give up, and consign the book to the outer darkness of DNF—Did Not Finish.
The debate among readers over when one is allowed to give up on a book reminded me of our debates in grad school over how long to give the teacher who was late to class. We settled on a schedule based on rank—10 minutes for a grad assistant, 15 for an instructor, 20 for a tenured professor. That’s more or less what I do with books now. My TBR (To Be Read) pile is enormous; I need to move books along to make room for new ones, so I need a system. Mine is based, more or less, on the status of the author and on reviews. I give respected authors a lot of leeway, which heightens my sense of betrayal if I conclude that book is not/was not worth my time.
So I particularly relished the discussion that ensued from the question “What books did you not just DNF but throw away? Readers can be vicious (just check comments on Goodreads) but they are also passionate. Throwing a book (out the window, against the wall, into the bin—there were many forms of such disapproval, all violent) is a form of personal expression but also a comment on that relationship between author and reader. It is the reader’s way of declaring “I thought I was getting X and I got Y, goddammit.”
When I begin to lose interest in a book I feel guilty about not reading it so I let it stay in the active pile. Time goes by. I notice I’m scrolling YouTube at night (which is bad for lots of reasons) and the book sits there. We are in a stalemate now, neither of us keeping up our end of the bargain. Finally, like leftovers pushed to the back of the fridge, the book goes back on some shelf until finally its time has truly passed and it goes to the library book sale. I don’t think I have ever thrown a book. Until this week.
I got sucked into trying a well-known, widely admired, and prolific historical fiction author. Sadly, I chose a series, which I know are quite trendy now. Painful cliffhangers at the end of very long books appeal to a devoted audience that haunts discussion boards to declare their devotion to the author who has left them in suspense for an unknown length of time. This particular series, set during the English Civil War and still there in Book Three, is, evidently, intended to reach to the 20th century. That’s asking a lot of readers who have a towering TBR pile. So when, at the end of the third book, the love interest of the main character was making the same speech of regret and contrition that he had made at the beginning of the book, and the detestable character who had arrived at the beginning of Book Two and hijacked the plot STILL had suffered no consequences, I threw the book onto the floor.
Every book arrives at a particular moment in a reader’s life and the author can neither predict nor accommodate those moments. These books arrived at a moment of particular unrest and anxiety for me. I have lost all patience for schemers and manipulators in my day-to-day, so I had no patience for one being rewarded nor for the expectation that I would come back for the next book in the series on the bet that justice would ever be done. I’m blurring the line between the world of the book and the world of the reader, I know, but the real-life plot that’s playing out in painfully slow motion in my context is the one I have to finish.