Top Ten Tuesday #21

Created by The Broke and The Bookish
Hosted byThat Artsy Reader Girl

The 5 Books I Did Not Finish (DNF'd)

1. A Touch of Darkness

DNF at 58%. I'm getting controversial quickly, but this just felt very under-developed. The character's did not feel like real people, and the prose was clunky and childish. It was impossible to get immersed in the story.

2. The Ming Storm

I'm a big Assassin's Creed fan, and this was the first novelization I picked up. I think I made it about 35% in when I DNF'd. Unfortunately, The Ming Storm sacrifices the book's flow and charm for the sake of technical specificity. What could have been a fun action-adventure novel got bogged down by trying to name and describe every specific fighting technique, causing short fights to take up pages and pages of mind-numbing descriptions.

3. Lovely War

I DNF'd this one around the 30% mark. As a historical fiction novel framed as Aphrodite telling us a love story, this should have been the perfect book for me! Where it went wrong was the writing style. I can't stand books that are "tell, not show," best practice is to do the exact opposite! Show me things, do not merely tell them. The POV's word should at least have actions to back their claims up.

4. Cloud Atlas

This one actually held my interest for a bit, but it is SO complicated and has way too many characters to keep track of. You start with the first half of each character's story and they are lightly connected to the next character (like letters of character B being owned by character C). They then go in reverse order in the second half of the book to finish their arcs, so the book is structured like so: ABCDEF, FEDCBA. I felt like I needed a diagram to keep up and remember what everyone was doing. I think this book only works if you have time to binge it all in one weekend.

5. The Keeper of Night

This one I DNF'd at 40%. The 40% mark is when the main character finally gets to the point of no return and starts her quest. This quest-point should have been so much earlier in the book. What were we doing for the first 150 pages you ask? World building and pretty uneventful travel from England to Japan. I think I could forgive it all if the 150 pages created any sort of intimacy or attachment for the main characters, but it didn't.

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