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Writer's pictureEmily

A DNF cemetary and three titles finished this year

I've written before about getting more persnickety about my reading and about clawing my way out of a post-covid reading slump. While I've been keeping my storygraph up-to-date, I haven't kept my own, personal reading log up, and when I did that this week, I saw that I had 6 DNFs from January through March, and four finished in that time. Since I hadn't written this down, I was focused on having actually finished a few new books from my TBR, and I was pleased. I'd completely forgotten about some of the titles; I think that the ones I DNF'd from audiobooks seemed to slip my mind more quickly.

I don't really want to drag the DNF books I didn't like, but I had a King Arthur fantasy book, a sci-fi classic, a contemporary thriller by a very popular author, and a book that supposed to be really funny among the ones I dropped. The first three were audios, and I usually love listening to them. Right now, I'm struggling with The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle. I think I'll finish it, but I'll probably have to renew. It's so slow, but I hate the sound of sped-up reading. Maybe I'll try switching to the print book. It's such an interesting premise! Why don't I like it more? I'm not giving up yet, but I always turn on music or my podcasts and forget about it.

More recently, I tried to push through a sci-fi that I thought would be so interesting, but it got on my nerves SO MUCH. One of the female characters was pretty, an actress, and had large breasts, and we had to have a reference to her chest about once every three pages. I made myself read half the book before I had to stop. The villains were all sadistic, too. Ugh. I didn't want to DNF again, but I had to do it.

I forced myself to read The Silence in Her Eyes, which I just couldn't stand. I thought that every thought, feeling, and decision by the main character was absolutely dumbfounding. It's another interesting premise- a young woman with motion blindness (I looked it up, it's real but rare) has recently been left to live alone after her mother died. Then she decides that her new neighbor is in danger and acts bizarre over and over to try to save her. One sentence would seem to contradict the rest. I left for a trip with one chapter left and didn't think about it once when I was gone. I did go ahead and finished it. I read a fantastic review of it before I checked it out, so someone else had a very different reaction to it. (I would link but it was months ago and I can't remember where it was.)

Some winners:

The Candy House (Jennifer Egan)

There There (Tommy Orange)


I've read Good Books! By Important Authors! My attention span held in there and I never wanted to throw any of these books across a room! Not once!


I also read the two Marvel books I wrote about in books of the future a few weeks ago, and I enjoyed them.


Right now, I'm reading Hello Beautiful, which I like but I kind of don't think about it in-between readings. Like, I only ever read it on my mornings off when I can sit on the sofa with a coffee, and it's right there. I've also started a Peter Pan re-telling that I'll write up later if I finish it, and I have four other books checked out- four! Luckily, I have some time off coming up.


*Actually, I finished off the last 100 pages of Hello Beautiful really quickly since starting this. I liked the ending alot.

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