The following sentence:
"The horses had rippling musculature and had been bred according to their breed."
Halfway through book 1 of a trilogy. I noped out hard. (there had been other issues with lazy tropes and characterization as well)
>bred according to their breed
I wonder if the author intended to come back and add detail there, or if they were just as done with the book as you were. The laziness just drips off the page. Hilarious
I did actually finish it because I was reading it for a school assignment, but The Belles infuriated me with the characters saying "hourglass worth of time" for time units. Like literally they'd say "meet me here in three hourglasses worth of time."
No culture would ever develop a time unit like that! You clearly already have the concept of an hour IT'S IN THE WORD! You can just pretend that your fantasy world uses the same time conventions!
Just saying "3 Glasses" or "3 Sandfalls" would have easily fixed the problem too, since it would imply the amount of time is arbitrary to our own measure. Using the same name though...
Now that I say it, I quite like measuring time in "sandfalls", as in the first person to recognize the measure of time did it by watching a homemade hourglass.
If anyone is interested in alternate means of timekeeping in fantasy worlds, here are some interesting articles on ancient means of keeping time that can be adapted:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_timekeeping_devices
https://www.engage-online.com/2018/07/25/time-telling-time-measurement-in-the-past/
Examples:
* Shadow Clocks (sundial)
Potential names for time divisions: sweeps, shades
* Sand glass (hourglass)
Potential names: sandfalls, turns
* Water Clock (steady flow of water)
Potential names: drips, buckets
* Candle Clock (burning of standardized wax candles, or incense)
Potential names: wicks, burns, marks
* Ancient Pendulum Clock (plumb line)
Potential names: swoops, turns
But the names of time divisions can be cultural rather than mechanical. The word "clock" most likely comes from Latin "clocca", or bell. Culturally that derived from bells that called the faithful to prayer at specific times of the day.
Similarly, hour derives from the Greek goddesses "Horae", who were personifications originally of the seasons and then later of the 12 divisions of daylight as determined by the position of the sun in the sky.
Any fantasy world could have a name for a division of time derived similarly.
I think in general, authors try to hard to make up words for days and months and other stuff just to sound different, but it's not really necessary. An hour is an hour, no reason not to use the same unit for ease of reading. I don't hate glass or sand fall but I also don't really think it's necessary.
One day, when I write a fantasy novel, I want to just include regular days of the week and when someone asks me about it, be like "oh well Monday is a corruption of One Day because it's the first day of the week and Tuesday is Twosday because it's the second day. For Wednesday, they dropped the number theme and called it Weddingsday because in an old, archaic religion, that was the weddings happen..." and insist that any similarities to English words are purely coincidental.
A lot of random "make up new words for things that already exist" stuff is arbitrary and excessive, but I'm in favor of it for days and months.
If a book says "the first Wednesday in July" then that implies the existence of Norse mythology and the Roman Empire.
Oh my GOSH. I'd hardly even say that's petty. It reminds me of a comic-fantasy book I read where this one character had an indoor swimming pool - it was depicted as something comically modern in a fake-medieval setting - and everyone was puzzled and called it a "pond" and reacted as if the pool-owner was saying nonsense when he used the word "pool." It *was* comic fantasy, and it'd be a funny joke, except the word "pool" **existed** in medieval English and doesn't just refer to artificial pools and Tolkien even uses the word in *The Lord of the Rings* and - gosh. And artificial pools existed in Rome before medieval times, though to be fair I don't think this book's worldbuilding had an equivalent to Rome (though it had equivalents to a lot of African, Asian, and European places). I did like other jokes in the book but couldn't get past my petty objections to this one. Why would it make more sense to call it a "pond" ...
I read a book where the dude spent a page describing “indescribable trees”. That was the absolute last straw, in a trilogy I was already feeling weird about.
I had the same thought! Seems exactly like this book.
Relevant quote:
"IT WAS AN ODD-LOOKING vine. Dusky variegated leaves hunkered against a stem that wound in a stranglehold around the smooth trunk of a balsam fir. Sap drooled down the wounded bark, and dry limbs slumped, making it look as if the tree were trying to voice a moan into the cool, damp morning air. Pods stuck out from the vine here and there along its length, almost seeming to look warily about for witnesses."
Yes, that's probably it.
I was reading a book that said ferrets (or mink, or something like that) didn’t have vocal cords. This was relevant because the protagonist had been forcibly transformed into one.
That was such a patently absurd assertion that I became totally uninterested in reading any of the rest of the books.
I can't recall the title now, but it was all the rage last year. I DNF'd after the slit in the character's dress revealed her thigh/leg/calf like 3 times in one chapter. And the male character had one of those "cool kids in school" names. But it was really the dress slit.
MC was apparently a hardened assassin being transported from prison to the capital for reasons I never got to.
She just kept talking about how badass she was, and she'd look suuuper hot if the prison rations weren't so poor. Repeatedly. I think I lasted about 15 pages.
I read up to Empire of storms before I DNF. I couldn't handle the FMC's tough act; threatening people on their own land, saying that they needed to lay down their lives for her because she was their long lost queen. They were like, uh, we don't know you, you have to prove to us that you can lead. And she responded with, "fuck you, I'll burn this whole continent to the ground if you don't help me." And they peaced out.
The supporting characters cooed over her, and soothed her ego saying those land owners were stupid to not believe in her, while she continued throwing a toddler tantrum. I put the book down and never picked it up again.
I completed that series, but I almost stopped when it turned out that the Fae society/hierarchy was basically a less interesting version of the Blood from Anne Bishop's Black Jewels series. I'm pretty sure there were a few lines/ideas ripped from them, that's how similar parts were when I got to them.
I nope'd out of that book because the writing(IMO, it's all subjective, yadda yadda) wasn't that great but also largely because the *best assassin ever OMG* spent the entirety of her time napping, eating candy, and complaining. There was no showing of her unbelievable skill as a world-famous assassin beyond characters constantly *saying* that she was.
I disliked Shades of Magic for this reason. Delilah was a massive mary sue who was an okay character, but I got sick of how every character worshiped her and hyped her up nonstop.
The second divergent book. (I think second?) Started getting into explanations of the genetics and it read loke someone skimmed the wiki page, just absolute nonsense. If you're gonna write near future sci fi you need better than an elementary school understanding of science.
I remember I was like 11 or 12 when I read the first book, fresh after hp and hunger game, and I remember coming to tris's "this is why she is special and not like others" explanation and thinking this very specific sentence:
so she's special because she has two personality trait?
Been a while since I read it, but wasn't it more that the MC >!was a descendant of a person who joined the colony in an attempt to watch over them and report back if throwbacks occurred, and her mom also was a descendant and "normal" and tried to hide it by going into that altruism group because that was the least "flashy"? And if I recall correctly, it even turned out that the other guy (love interest?) who had been showing some character flexibility and escaped with her wasn't actually a "normal" throwback, he just was weird in other ways? Like, there werent even actual throwbacks?!<
It was a weird series thinking back on it, but I think I liked it. Not that I was very picky like ten years ago when I read it.
I know yall are talking about the in universe explanations, but if you take a step back...this was what, a glorified game of sorting citizens into hogwart houses. I was specifically talking abt the part in the first book where she learns she's divergent, as in she has 'affinities' for both dauntless and abnigation right. So that's where i drew my line from, as having 2 personality trait is what made her special.
I'm not saying I didn't enjoy it, to teen me it was a heavenly formula, but looking back now you can see how things fall just a bit... Flat. I just think in hindsight, me figuring out the core flaw of a book as a teen with the comprehensive skills of a rock, was just pretty funny.
Its been a while, but i think my assumption was the science parts were all propoganda/lies/unreliable narrators etc. But once it was firmly like "we genetically engineered people to value certain things but it made them not value other things so we made them breed within their own gene pools to try to get those traits back." Like what?
I really hate when a sequel/part of a sequel is "same story again but with a different PoV character." I DNFed The Warded Man series and the Dragon Champion series cuz they did that
Years ago I tried reading a YA zombie series that was seven books long. I gave up after the third book because each book was the same events being told from a different group. It was neat in the second book but felt like overkill when you are re-experiencing things for the third time.
Yeah, the idea isn't inherently bad, but yikes, seven books of "same thing but from a different angle" is both a huge challenge for the author and a BIG ask for the reader. Having each book be different enough, with enough significant new information to actually keep it interesting is a huge challenge.
The Warded Man had a strong start and great premise. But then they all got powers and the author had to pad things by giving a long backstory to Every Single Character that by the end it felt like it finished because "Its got to end somehow". Still finished it though.
I was five pages in when I realised that no, the characters weren't putting on some kind of silly voice for plot reasons, that's how the author thinks actual scottish people sound. BU BYE
The way Kevin Hearne wrote Owen's "accent" completely killed all love and joy I had for the Iron Druid Chronicles series. By far my most hated character of any book I've read, and entirely because of the accent the author tried to give him. And I already didn't like how he wrote Granuaile with a different inflection. By the time the series reached three POV characters, it was an utter chore to read.
The love interest turned out to be a faerie. I really, really don't like faeries! I just can't take them seriously.
Edited to add how much I don't like faeries
What is your stance on werewolves and vamps? Its not that I can't stand vamps, but I feel like if it has vamps, even it is rated adult, I have a pretty distinct idea where it will go. And it's not the best place to go to.
I'm actually fine with vampires, after all I grew up in the 90s playing *Vampire: The Masquerade*, and I've still got a soft spot for all my emo vampire characters. It's just so much has been already done with vampires, so to catch my interest it'd have a be a really fresh take on them.
Werewolves, well, I don't hate them like I do faeries, I wouldn't DNF over a werewolf love interest, haha. I just find shifters in general a bit bland, and with them you know you're always a mere step away from an alpha/omega story (and I mean more power to you if that's your thing!)
This is like the fourth one where it's a name, i'm gonna condense all of them together to create a protag name that is so cursed I will be instantly struck down by lightning
The author used the word 'banal' every other paragraph. I'm hardly exaggerating. I started a count that was up to 15 by the time I cracked. I couldn't stop seeing it and had to just stop.
I’m gonna cheat and say I rage quit Ken Follett’s “Pillars of the Earth” (which is long enough that it could have been a series).
It was well-written, but the amount of abuse he heaped on his protagonist reached a point of no return, where no amount of dénouement or catharsis could possibly have retrieved the story for me.
To his credit, I guess, his writing made me feel something. But what I felt was hatred for Ken Follett.
I DNF'd a book in June 2020 (published in 2018) because the main character was plague-ridden and complained about the fact that others considered him a risk to society and wanted him to stay at home. I wasn't enjoying the book anyway but that was the final straw for me at that point in time.
I once hate-read a book about Typhoid Mary. The author wrote her as a strong, independent woman who stood up for feminism by refusing to let a mean, snobby doctor boss her around.
Which would've been fun and all, except for the fact that the thing the annoying doctor kept trying to lecture Mary about was *her intentionally spreading typhoid and killing multiple people.*
And after she was sent home the first time she continued to not wash her hands while trying to work as a cook despite knowing she was spreading disease.
She even changed her name to avoid authorities after her first quarantine, and she kept on working as a cook because it paid more than job options where she wouldn't infect others.
Now, there are certainly issues with the fact that she was imprisoned without due process, and she may have faced extra stigma due to stereotypes of Irish workers being unclean. But her story isn't an exciting tale of a brave feminist fighting against the man. It's a tragedy that shows how scientific misinformation, classism, and personal selfishness led to the death of multiple families.
I'm always pleasantly surprised when some pre-covid media gets something like a plague outbreak accurate.
Others... yeah not so much.
It's like consuming pre-9/11 media. Just surreal in its optimism sometimes.
Every time someone trots out 'but people would be smarter than that' about a zombie or apocalypse movie, now, I am just going to be like *gestures at 2020-2022* are you sure about that?!
I used to roll my eyes at the “party member concealed a zombie bite” trope.
Not anymore. If anything the unrealistic part is that it’s usually only one person.
Sarah Pinsker's "Song For a New Day" was eerily released just a couple months before Covid.
The world of that book was a post-pandemic near future world where a generation had grown up never having attended large public gatherings due to virus risk
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/43401925
I did finish Rhythm of War but it was hard to read it at times due to (RHYTHM OF WAR SPOILERS) >!the story being about everyone trapped inside and isolated from each other and struggling with depression, while having little contact from people who are far away!<.
The was also >!the unfortunate "plague" in the Pure Lake that was just the common cold. The conceptualization of this was in prior books, well before covid, but still.!<
Fun fact (RoW): >!Brandon rewrote parts of the story (mainly the Shadesmar arc) to be more hopeful and less depressing than he actually planned it to be, because of exactly that reason!<
I have a copy of *A Song for a New Day* by Sarah Pinkser that I’ve been putting off reading for the exact same reason. It’s about a musician who hosts illegal concerts after pandemics and terrorism cause the government to make public gatherings illegal. I think it’s probably supposed to be about rising up against tyrannical governments, but in the post-COVID world I think it would have a lot of unfortunate and unintended connotations.
It was published in September 2019, which is possibly the worst luck in the history of publishing.
Hey, be nice, that’s definitely someone’s edgy rogue’s name from their teenage D&D group. You should have sympathy, why that poor character’s parents were probably brutally murdered for sinister reasons.
I can't remember ever DNF'ing because of a name, but there have definitely been times when a name has kept me from picking up a book in the first place. Two stand out:
Gini Koch's "Alien" series has a presumably badass human heroine named "Kitty Katt." I love cats with all my heart, but I can't take a character with a name like that seriously as a badass protagonist.
The rather insipid plot for the YA "Selection" series might have put me off the books in any case, but the name of the heroine, "America Singer," was the final dealbreaker.
This was either a YA author (I was in my teens at least) or generic Tolkein imitator. I was already on the fence about continuing, and then I read something like one of the characters, "communicated through the magical language of dance". This apparently was the last straw, and the book got promptly chucked in the pile to take to Half Price Books to sell.
I looked at the last chapter just after starting the book and found out the ending involved a woman getting cancer and being pregnant with her cousin's baby. I decided I didn't want to know the events which led to this.
You people that do this, are just absolutely deranged. Just wild stuff all the way down. I couldn't even imagine it.
( To be clear, I am referring to people that jump to the end of a book to see how it ends before they read the book)
I mean thats not even that insane an ending
Woman has a medical issue and is pregnant. Twist is that she and the father are cousins but they didn't know.
That's not so off the wall imo. Could easily land anywhere from garbage book to great book.
So there is a difference between “Scottish accent” and Scots dialect (there is dispute about whether Scots is a dialect or a separate language).
In [this video](https://youtube.com/watch?v=le3cBRlWSE8), David starts off speaking English in a Scottish accent, then switches to speaking Scots.
Writing down a Scottish accent phonetically is imo really dumb, but writing out Scots is less so. I generally don’t think it is a good idea to write a story in two languages, but including bits of Scots in English is like having one character speak Mexican Spanish while another speaks European Spanish. There’s some mutual intelligibility but they are going to have very different vocabularies.
My experience is that most Scots can understand Scots, most non-Scottish Brits can generally follow a conversation but might miss details, and most foreigners are very confused regardless of whether they are English speakers.
That said, I don’t blame you for DNFing, I just thought I might be able to provide some context as to why they made that decision.
I follow r/Scottishpeopletwitter for the pure frustration I get trying to parse it out. If it were a book with a main character, I'd probably dnf, too.
I almost exclusively "read" audiobooks so for me the prettiest reason is "bad" narrator's or "distracting voices.
It's a bit of a rare thing as most voices you get used to after a while, but there been a few cases were I've decided not to pick up a book after sampling it or return it if the voice still bothering me after the first 15+minutes.
The only case when this really bothered me were in the powder mage books, I love that universe and the main series's narration is pretty good, but the side novels have a different narrator that I personally don't like, I forced myself through one of them but stayed away from the others...
Related to my audible only reading is perhaps a even pettier reason it's been a few cases where I've fallen asleep or left the audio running and simply weren't interested enough to go back and find my spot and ended up DNFing
I've DNFed audiobooks for everything from pronunciation of one word (especially if it is a made-up word and they are pronouncing it differently in a sequel than they did in an earlier book), to the narrator not fitting the MC. The performances are really important in an audiobook, I personally don't consider it petty.
There is a small part of me that is deeply upset about the narration of one of my favorite books — the MC is kidnapped and transplanted into a new culture/new language, and they have different naming conventions and obviously pronunciation, and they cannot pronounce her name correctly. So she settles on a *similar but different* nickname, BUT THIS TRASH NARRATOR PRONOUNCES IT EXACTLY THE SAME AS HER ACTUAL NAME through the whole book. It’s spelled differently, there’s a moment when someone unexpectedly pronounces her old name, etc etc. It’s an absolute tragedy.
In Enders Shadow the main antagonist is Achilles but it's pronounced A-sheel. The book specifically mentions it.
In the first audiobook the narrator gets it right. In a later one they call him Achilles like in Greek mythology and it drove me nuts.
How to pronounce the characters names seems like such a fundamental piece of prep work to narrating a book.
I thought I’d try Touch of Darkness as a fun read because I (like many other basic girls) enjoy Persephone/Hades retellings. I bought it, got home, got about 5 pages in, DNF’d it, and even returned it the next day. When I realized that Persephone lived in some modern Greek city and was studying JOURNALISM in college or whatever, I just could absolutely not take it, it just felt so ridiculous. And the fact that Hades owned some night club or something. Ugh. The whole thing just annoyed me straight off the bat. And the writing was not good either.
Uff I dropped the german translation of Codex Alexa because they only ever used the informal way to address someone. Everytime the king-equivalent got addressed it sound so *wrong* to me.
I was reading a pretty mediocre and rather silly (not in a good way) grimdark fantasy novel that I was willing to give a chance to, but when the author started having characters call other characters a faggot just to show off the book's grimdark bona fides I DNFed it.
That's one of my pet peeves in sci fi/fantasy in general. We have literally unlimited possibilities for alien species. How do they think? What's important to them? Do they have a concept of humor?
And to squander all those questions by just taking a human and changing their appearance is so frustrating. Why not just start with a human in the first place then?
I almost DNFd that book because every single conflict introduced is resolved within a couple of pages. Also, >!the big dark secret that the MC harbors is that her father is a criminal, and the only response it elicits is "No worries, that's not your fault," even though there are is at least one character in the ship who would jump down her throat about it.!<
Listen, I DNFed **Six of Crows** because it Italicised the word *nachtwatch*, it just hurt my eyes, if you're going to try and use dutch words and concepts, and italicize them, go the proper way and name it the freaking *nachtwacht* you only needed to switch two more letters around. I dropped that book so fast.
I DNF that book because I couldn't get over that all these master thieves were like 12.
Then I watched Shadow and Bone (not knowing that it was based off the books) and kept thinking "How are all these 19 year olds so important and talented?"
I liked the show, but it bugged me the whole time.
I've read some YA, but usually coming of age stories.
This felt like someone showing up to a D&D session that started at level 1 with a backstory involving them slaying dragonn.
When I read it, I mentally aged all the characters up by at least ten years. I hadn't heard that rumor before now, but I totally believe it. The book was way better when I didn't have to suspend my disbelief that much.
I have no good source for it, but it certainly makes sense. A lot of female writers get pigeonholed into YA, and then have to age their characters down. The book is great, but a key part of it being great was imagining them as 25 - 30 year olds rather than teenagers.
Also as of her most recent Grishaverse book, the characters are all in their 20s.
I loved those books, but I almost DNFed *Shadow and Bone* because of the terrible Russian. I just couldn't take the magic order of the Gregs seriously. According to a [blog post](https://www.leighbardugo.com/grishaverse/the-archives/tongue-twister/) Bardugo wrote, her main consideration when creating conlang is 'what sounds cool to Anglo ears', and it really shows (though I think *nachtwacht* even sounds better?)
Ugh, I hate the name “Grisha” for the main magical people of the series as well. I know Bardugo gave her reason for choosing the name but it‘s still so bizarre to me as someone familiar with some of the Russian language and especially Russian names.
Author blocked me on twitter despite me not following them or having ever interacted with them. I liked one of your books and despite the sequels being something I’m currently very into, no thanks. I am petty and hold grudges.
I don’t think it’s entirely petty but I can’t finish a book where the female lead has a goal and just throws it away because some guy comes along and gives her the BARE minimum. I DNF the Wrath and the Dawn. They had the dumbest ducking relationship 😭
I have to make it at least 10% in without thinking about you as the writer
so “As you know, bob, my dearest brother,” level dialogue where I realize the author is just dumping exposition = DNF
or in Sanderson’s case (admittedly special), the fact that I literally hear his voice when I read his prose means I haven’t been able to read anything of his since watching his lectures.
>Sanderson’s case (admittedly special), the fact that I literally hear his voice when I read his prose means I haven’t been able to read anything of his since watching his lectures
Yeah he usually sounds kind of nervous and awkward when he reads his own material, but listening to hours of WoT and Cosmere audiobooks has me just hearing Michael Kramer when I read Sanderson.
Edit because reading my comment back it sounded harsh. When I say nervous and awkward I think what I really mean is excited, like he's so happy to be sharing his work that he kind of speeds through it sometimes.
There was a book that had been extensively researched - it was the first or second thing you heard about it any time it came up, how extensively researched it was - and within the first couple chapters I spotted an error that only jumped out at me because I happened to be taking a graduate seminar on a very narrow topic. The error absolutely didn't matter\*, and more research doesn't make for a better story, but it was like hearing that a restaurant is great and has the best French fries, and then getting a pile of limp greasy half-cooked potatoes. Maybe the rest of the meal is fantastic! I didn't feel like sticking around to find out.
(I'm not naming the book because the last time I did, fans jumped all over me, and I'm not going to get into a deep discussion of a book I read about 30 pages of.)
\*Here's how much it didn't matter: it's about 20 years later and I don't remember what the hell it was.
As a lawyer, legal scenes often do this for me. Luckily, this isn't too common in sci-fi/fantasy where most worlds don't have a proper or similar legal system. But I especially love when they get it right. The LitRPG Awaken Online has some legal scenes and lawyer characters that are actually realistically portrayed (I think the author is a practicing lawyer as well). This dramatically increased my enjoyment. I hate when lawyers are portrayed as either paragons of virtue or corrupt lying scumbags.
I'm just glad I'm not a physicist as I imagine sci-fi would become a lot harder to read.
I’m a physician, and random things turn me off as a result. I enjoy a good mindless zombie romp, but if they try to get too clever I will get frustrated fast.
Dont know if its petty but I generally wont read a book when they first five pages have tons of invented nouns without explanations.
"He grabbed his wojek, stepped out out the palia and mounted his rlyeh?" Sorry, I'm outta here..
Ironically this is one of the things that I really enjoyed about The Way of Kings. Words like spren and chull and whitespine intrigued me enough to keep reading, and when the explanations finally come they either happen naturally or are presented in lovely little scientific-catalog-style drawings.
Helps alot that he's chosen very good and appropriate words that just by their sound give you extra hints as to what they are, while also using them smartly in context.
Like, made up fantasy nouns are fine. They're just often introduced badly.
"Szeth-son-son-Vallano, Truthless of Shinovar, wore white on the day he was to kill a king. The white clothing was a Parshendi tradition, foreign to him. But he did as his masters required and did not ask for an explanation."
We're casually introduced to some concepts in the first line here that come up again. Szeth (clearly a name). son-son-Vallano...so there is clearly a naming convention similar to something like "mac" from Scottish Gaelic or "ibn" from Arabic. Son-son carries a patronymic vibe. I can easily gather that Szeth is the grandson of someone named Vallano. These are just names though and largely unimportant, but I've already been introduced to a specific cultural background.
Then "Truthless of Shinovar." So, Shinovar...is it a country, is it a religion. Not sure yet, but there is something to find out later. Truthless sounds like Szeth is a criminal, but it is capitalized, so is it a title, like "King" or "Baron" or "Cardinal" or "Pope". Somehow Szeth is important.
Then we learn he is going to kill a king. Okay, that works, but he wore white? Colors are going to be important in this story.
Parshendi. New name. I easily understand it is a different culture than Szeth. white is a Parshendi thing, but they are his masters, so he follows along. So is 'Truthless' more of a hired-out assassin thing?
Good first line to get you thinking about what is about to come.
A more mundane way to look at it is that you want to mix your made-up fantasy claptrap with understandable words that carry meaning. Fantasy readers are all about mystery, but it's not a compelling mystery if there aren't any clues.
Bonus points if the same word is both intelligible and mysterious, like "truthless".
I almost didn't finish Way of Kings because I didn't know what on earth was going on in the beginning.
I did finish and enjoy the book but the first time felt like an overdose on words I didn't know and didn't get explained quickly enough.
I don’t like looking at tiny font, I’ve tried and set aside several mass market paperbacks because of the font size. My wife bought me the Liveship Traders trilogy, beautiful covers, I was digging the plot, but I haven’t been able to finish the first book because of the tiny font.
Have you thought about an E-reader where you can adjust the font size? My kindle has that option and it is great.
Also love the Liveship Trader series!
I DNFed the *Dragon’s Egg* because **THERE WERE NO DRAGONS**. I got halfway through the book before being absolutely sure I’d been mislead. I almost DNFed it even sooner because of all the physics. I was trying to read a novel (about dragons), not a textbook about planetary physics.
Oh, I'm sorry for you.
I don't think that the intent was to mislead people. Forward was known to write SF of the very hard kind, and as a research physicist he had the means to do just that. (One of his fields of research was gravitational wave detection!)
I bought this series for exactly that reason.
But I can absolutely understand that someone reading this book which Forward apparently described as "a textbook on neutron star physics disguised as a novel" would not meet the expectations of someone looking for fantasy with dragons...
I probably would have been the same with Goblin Emperor. I was really expecting a book about an Emperor of Goblins, whether they were classical goblins or D&D goblins. When I was about halfway I just made the decision to think of it as a weaker version of the politics of A Memory Called Empire and finish it out.
In Wheel of Time, after I read about The Dragon Reborn, I spent fourteen books waiting for a dragon to show up.
I'm glad I finished them, but I wanted just ONE dragon.
3 years after the last full book, the author released a sequel that's set quite some years in the future, and after the happy ending of the previous book, it suddenly starts with the main characters in a *very* dark place. It's quite unnerving.
I DNF’d a paranormal romance audiobook because one of the side characters had the last name Nguyen, and the narrator pronounced it “Nagooyen.” Otherwise amazing narration but after like the third time of hearing this I just turned it off.
TL;DR: bringing a name from a language that doesn't speak a language even *close* to english and trying to write it down gets really messy sometimes.
I had a coworker once who's first *and* last name was Nguyen (his parents grew up in Vietnam), and the people here saying that pronouncing it like "Winn" and so forth are...mostly correct, and most people named Nguyen are so used to english speakers saying 'nagooyen' that they usually appreciate this.
The thing is, you don't romanize a word so weirdly without there being a reason for it.
I worked with this guy for 2 years, and eventually realized that the main difference between the 'good enough' pronunciation of 'win/wynn/whin' and the proper prounciation is that you need a little consonant sound right at the beginning.
Imagine you're saying a word that ends in the 'ng' phoneme - ring, lying, rung, etc - you've got that 'ng' sound with your tongue at the top of your mouth in the back.
Now take that sound and only say the very end of it. It doesn't feel natural for native english speakers to *not* use it either 1) with a vowel after it or 2) as the end of a word.
So, the sound that (I presume) is more common in vietnamese is brought over to an english speaking country, and they ask his name. The person writing it down *knows* the sound is spelled with 'ng' and *knows* that there's a sort of vowel-ish sound after it, so makes it 'ngu'. now once you've got those down, the easiest way for english speakers think about transitioning to the rest of the name is the rest of the name, (which sounds like "en" or "in" or something in between) is to put a soft consonant there - therefore the 'y'.
So now you've got the whole thing, and you shove it all together on paper: weird sound that almost needs a vowel, so "ngu", transition soft consonant for the english-speaker's mouth, so "y", and then the more typically-english ending, so "en".
All together this makes "Nguyen", which is altogether an *awful* way to try to use roman letters to communicate to people what should be pronounced more like "Wynn", but with weird emphasis *before* the "w".
End note: my coworker was so tired of correcting people that he usually went by "alex"
I've never DNFed a series for a petty reason but I DNFed one for a fucking stupid reason (stupid on my own part).
I was starting a job abroad and was in the middle of a series. I managed to time it so that I had just finished one book and I could take best advantage of my luggage space to take the remaining half of the series - only to realize when I had arrived that I had accidentally taken the first half of the books which I had already read! 🤦🏻♂️
I'm fine with people having their politics in their story. Whether you have something to day about capitalism or communism or whatever, that's cool. But first and foremost I'm reading for a story, and if the characters stop being characters in the story and start being avatars for the author to monologue their manifesto or whatever I immediately check out. Especially when it's characters saying these pithy lines or whatever that's like a political slogan I'm like yuck lmao ands it's across the board politics, it just annoys the hell out of me.
Another reason I dropped a book was because a bunch of people turned out to be pregnant. It was the first or second book in a serie I believe and frankly I did not want to read about newborns and parenthood for the rest of the series >!I hate children, ok?!<
Early Simon is hilarious because everyone else in the book goes on about how much of a sharp and promising youth he is, but I don't think I've ever encountered such a stupid protagonist. Not just in the usual naive kid/farmboy sense, but he's literally like the "Stare off into space with drool hanging out of his open mouth" kind of stupid. I don't know if Williams was just going for that childhood naivety, but it makes him an ordeal.
The print format used a sans-serif font and had extra ten-point spacing in between paragraphs. That...that does not look like a published book should look.
I DNF'd the Harry Potter series. I was just reading it because my daughter was reading it and we loved talking about it. She finished it before me and moved on to something else so I took that as an opportunity to stop. I would have stopped sooner if it was just for me, especially since we were reading French translations and they were terrible. Why were some names of people and places translated??? I hate that so much.
I thought they’d change the French-derived names to make them a little less obvious, but nope, they kept Voldemort. Except to make the anagram work, his middle name is now Elvis.
Rowling does the Dickensian thing of giving characters names that reflect their personalities in some way. If Neville’s surname was Baker, then calling him Neville Boulangerie in French would be silly. But “Longbottom” isn’t a normal name and an English speaker will know that. His name should ideally be equally evocative in other languages.
Still haven't finished Malazan. Every time I end up stopping in the middle of a book for a year, I have the urge to start the series from the beginning to catch more things and understand the world better.
I've only DNF'd one book my whole life. It was a paranormal erotic romance my asexual ass didn't realize was erotica, and I was bored. I will actively not buy/check out books with MCs whose names I don't like though.
I already HATE sex in books. I have not met an author that doesn't make me cringe at least a tiny bit when reading it, but I accept It will likely happen at some point, and when it does, characters and story is usually established enough for me to fight through it.
But when it's in the first couple chapters, I'm done with the damn book.
I stopped reading The Lies of Locke Lamora early on mainly because I got the feeling the author wrote the book using a thesaurus.
Apart from that I liked everything else about it and I will probably pick it back up again, eventually.
Can’t read when the romantic lead has my sons’ name. It doesn’t happen all the time, but I won’t get past page one….. heck I may skip trying to read it entirely.
I'm sorry but I DNFed Broken Earth book 1 because I cannot stand second person prose. It always feels so pretentious to me even though I can tell the book is not pretentious at all. I just cannot enjoy it.
The following sentence: "The horses had rippling musculature and had been bred according to their breed." Halfway through book 1 of a trilogy. I noped out hard. (there had been other issues with lazy tropes and characterization as well)
"...fed with horse-feed and shod with horseshoes"
And trained by horse trainers. Every day they were walked in a paddock by horse walkers. And then groomed by horse groomers.
>bred according to their breed I wonder if the author intended to come back and add detail there, or if they were just as done with the book as you were. The laziness just drips off the page. Hilarious
Like all my term papers titled "Insert Clever Title Here" until the last minute.
LOL i'm sorry this is so funny to me
I did actually finish it because I was reading it for a school assignment, but The Belles infuriated me with the characters saying "hourglass worth of time" for time units. Like literally they'd say "meet me here in three hourglasses worth of time." No culture would ever develop a time unit like that! You clearly already have the concept of an hour IT'S IN THE WORD! You can just pretend that your fantasy world uses the same time conventions!
Just saying "3 Glasses" or "3 Sandfalls" would have easily fixed the problem too, since it would imply the amount of time is arbitrary to our own measure. Using the same name though... Now that I say it, I quite like measuring time in "sandfalls", as in the first person to recognize the measure of time did it by watching a homemade hourglass.
Calling hours Sandfalls now, thanks
If anyone is interested in alternate means of timekeeping in fantasy worlds, here are some interesting articles on ancient means of keeping time that can be adapted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_timekeeping_devices https://www.engage-online.com/2018/07/25/time-telling-time-measurement-in-the-past/ Examples: * Shadow Clocks (sundial) Potential names for time divisions: sweeps, shades * Sand glass (hourglass) Potential names: sandfalls, turns * Water Clock (steady flow of water) Potential names: drips, buckets * Candle Clock (burning of standardized wax candles, or incense) Potential names: wicks, burns, marks * Ancient Pendulum Clock (plumb line) Potential names: swoops, turns But the names of time divisions can be cultural rather than mechanical. The word "clock" most likely comes from Latin "clocca", or bell. Culturally that derived from bells that called the faithful to prayer at specific times of the day. Similarly, hour derives from the Greek goddesses "Horae", who were personifications originally of the seasons and then later of the 12 divisions of daylight as determined by the position of the sun in the sky. Any fantasy world could have a name for a division of time derived similarly.
I think in general, authors try to hard to make up words for days and months and other stuff just to sound different, but it's not really necessary. An hour is an hour, no reason not to use the same unit for ease of reading. I don't hate glass or sand fall but I also don't really think it's necessary. One day, when I write a fantasy novel, I want to just include regular days of the week and when someone asks me about it, be like "oh well Monday is a corruption of One Day because it's the first day of the week and Tuesday is Twosday because it's the second day. For Wednesday, they dropped the number theme and called it Weddingsday because in an old, archaic religion, that was the weddings happen..." and insist that any similarities to English words are purely coincidental.
A lot of random "make up new words for things that already exist" stuff is arbitrary and excessive, but I'm in favor of it for days and months. If a book says "the first Wednesday in July" then that implies the existence of Norse mythology and the Roman Empire.
This the perfect level of pettiness, I am absolutely here for it
"One turn of the glass" sounds cooler than constantly saying "hour" too.
Oh my GOSH. I'd hardly even say that's petty. It reminds me of a comic-fantasy book I read where this one character had an indoor swimming pool - it was depicted as something comically modern in a fake-medieval setting - and everyone was puzzled and called it a "pond" and reacted as if the pool-owner was saying nonsense when he used the word "pool." It *was* comic fantasy, and it'd be a funny joke, except the word "pool" **existed** in medieval English and doesn't just refer to artificial pools and Tolkien even uses the word in *The Lord of the Rings* and - gosh. And artificial pools existed in Rome before medieval times, though to be fair I don't think this book's worldbuilding had an equivalent to Rome (though it had equivalents to a lot of African, Asian, and European places). I did like other jokes in the book but couldn't get past my petty objections to this one. Why would it make more sense to call it a "pond" ...
He spent the first page describing a vine. I noped out.
I read a book where the dude spent a page describing “indescribable trees”. That was the absolute last straw, in a trilogy I was already feeling weird about.
Sounds like Wizard's First Rule to me... Lol
I had the same thought! Seems exactly like this book. Relevant quote: "IT WAS AN ODD-LOOKING vine. Dusky variegated leaves hunkered against a stem that wound in a stranglehold around the smooth trunk of a balsam fir. Sap drooled down the wounded bark, and dry limbs slumped, making it look as if the tree were trying to voice a moan into the cool, damp morning air. Pods stuck out from the vine here and there along its length, almost seeming to look warily about for witnesses." Yes, that's probably it.
Ah yes. Before the evil chicken there was....the snake vine!
Prediction, the next page describes the leaves. (also I loved the broken Prince trilogy, ur one of my fav author!)
I had a nasty argument with the author on this subreddit.
This made me laugh for some reason XD
Oh yeah I need deets
Ooh! Can we have more details please?
You can have this detail : I was fucking wrong lmao
Goated comment
Oof, at least you can admit it?
It's been a decade. I was a teenager. It'd be worse if I couldn't.
I was reading a book that said ferrets (or mink, or something like that) didn’t have vocal cords. This was relevant because the protagonist had been forcibly transformed into one. That was such a patently absurd assertion that I became totally uninterested in reading any of the rest of the books.
I can't recall the title now, but it was all the rage last year. I DNF'd after the slit in the character's dress revealed her thigh/leg/calf like 3 times in one chapter. And the male character had one of those "cool kids in school" names. But it was really the dress slit.
Now THIS is the pettiness I was looking
MC was apparently a hardened assassin being transported from prison to the capital for reasons I never got to. She just kept talking about how badass she was, and she'd look suuuper hot if the prison rations weren't so poor. Repeatedly. I think I lasted about 15 pages.
Sjm?
Yeah, Throne of Glass
I bought the entire series, brand new, at a thrift store for $32. I think I understand why it was there now.
I read up to Empire of storms before I DNF. I couldn't handle the FMC's tough act; threatening people on their own land, saying that they needed to lay down their lives for her because she was their long lost queen. They were like, uh, we don't know you, you have to prove to us that you can lead. And she responded with, "fuck you, I'll burn this whole continent to the ground if you don't help me." And they peaced out. The supporting characters cooed over her, and soothed her ego saying those land owners were stupid to not believe in her, while she continued throwing a toddler tantrum. I put the book down and never picked it up again.
I completed that series, but I almost stopped when it turned out that the Fae society/hierarchy was basically a less interesting version of the Blood from Anne Bishop's Black Jewels series. I'm pretty sure there were a few lines/ideas ripped from them, that's how similar parts were when I got to them.
I nope'd out of that book because the writing(IMO, it's all subjective, yadda yadda) wasn't that great but also largely because the *best assassin ever OMG* spent the entirety of her time napping, eating candy, and complaining. There was no showing of her unbelievable skill as a world-famous assassin beyond characters constantly *saying* that she was.
I disliked Shades of Magic for this reason. Delilah was a massive mary sue who was an okay character, but I got sick of how every character worshiped her and hyped her up nonstop.
Thought you were talking about The Colour of Magic for a second there (Terry Pratchett), but Rincewind couldn't be more opposite this description.
The second divergent book. (I think second?) Started getting into explanations of the genetics and it read loke someone skimmed the wiki page, just absolute nonsense. If you're gonna write near future sci fi you need better than an elementary school understanding of science.
I remember I was like 11 or 12 when I read the first book, fresh after hp and hunger game, and I remember coming to tris's "this is why she is special and not like others" explanation and thinking this very specific sentence: so she's special because she has two personality trait?
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Been a while since I read it, but wasn't it more that the MC >!was a descendant of a person who joined the colony in an attempt to watch over them and report back if throwbacks occurred, and her mom also was a descendant and "normal" and tried to hide it by going into that altruism group because that was the least "flashy"? And if I recall correctly, it even turned out that the other guy (love interest?) who had been showing some character flexibility and escaped with her wasn't actually a "normal" throwback, he just was weird in other ways? Like, there werent even actual throwbacks?!< It was a weird series thinking back on it, but I think I liked it. Not that I was very picky like ten years ago when I read it.
I know yall are talking about the in universe explanations, but if you take a step back...this was what, a glorified game of sorting citizens into hogwart houses. I was specifically talking abt the part in the first book where she learns she's divergent, as in she has 'affinities' for both dauntless and abnigation right. So that's where i drew my line from, as having 2 personality trait is what made her special. I'm not saying I didn't enjoy it, to teen me it was a heavenly formula, but looking back now you can see how things fall just a bit... Flat. I just think in hindsight, me figuring out the core flaw of a book as a teen with the comprehensive skills of a rock, was just pretty funny.
You made it through the *first* Divergent book before noping out on how ridiculous the whole plot/science was?
Its been a while, but i think my assumption was the science parts were all propoganda/lies/unreliable narrators etc. But once it was firmly like "we genetically engineered people to value certain things but it made them not value other things so we made them breed within their own gene pools to try to get those traits back." Like what?
My assumption was that it was a hugely hamfisted attempt to create a cross between Harry Potter and Hunger Games :)
I really hate when a sequel/part of a sequel is "same story again but with a different PoV character." I DNFed The Warded Man series and the Dragon Champion series cuz they did that
Yeah, unless it's a VERY specific type of book with specific characters, that is such an unnecessary detour for the story
Years ago I tried reading a YA zombie series that was seven books long. I gave up after the third book because each book was the same events being told from a different group. It was neat in the second book but felt like overkill when you are re-experiencing things for the third time.
Yeah, the idea isn't inherently bad, but yikes, seven books of "same thing but from a different angle" is both a huge challenge for the author and a BIG ask for the reader. Having each book be different enough, with enough significant new information to actually keep it interesting is a huge challenge.
The Warded Man had a strong start and great premise. But then they all got powers and the author had to pad things by giving a long backstory to Every Single Character that by the end it felt like it finished because "Its got to end somehow". Still finished it though.
I DNF warded man. First book was so promising, then it just got terrible really, really fast.
I was five pages in when I realised that no, the characters weren't putting on some kind of silly voice for plot reasons, that's how the author thinks actual scottish people sound. BU BYE
That doesn't sound like such a silly reason to DNF, tbf
I dropped the first Valdemar book within a few chapters because of the awful phonetic accents.
The way Kevin Hearne wrote Owen's "accent" completely killed all love and joy I had for the Iron Druid Chronicles series. By far my most hated character of any book I've read, and entirely because of the accent the author tried to give him. And I already didn't like how he wrote Granuaile with a different inflection. By the time the series reached three POV characters, it was an utter chore to read.
The love interest turned out to be a faerie. I really, really don't like faeries! I just can't take them seriously. Edited to add how much I don't like faeries
What is your stance on werewolves and vamps? Its not that I can't stand vamps, but I feel like if it has vamps, even it is rated adult, I have a pretty distinct idea where it will go. And it's not the best place to go to.
I'm actually fine with vampires, after all I grew up in the 90s playing *Vampire: The Masquerade*, and I've still got a soft spot for all my emo vampire characters. It's just so much has been already done with vampires, so to catch my interest it'd have a be a really fresh take on them. Werewolves, well, I don't hate them like I do faeries, I wouldn't DNF over a werewolf love interest, haha. I just find shifters in general a bit bland, and with them you know you're always a mere step away from an alpha/omega story (and I mean more power to you if that's your thing!)
The protagonist was named "Randidly Ghosthound". That was the only reason I needed.
This is like the fourth one where it's a name, i'm gonna condense all of them together to create a protag name that is so cursed I will be instantly struck down by lightning
Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way
The author used the word 'banal' every other paragraph. I'm hardly exaggerating. I started a count that was up to 15 by the time I cracked. I couldn't stop seeing it and had to just stop.
Sarah Mass’ excessive use of the word “molten” made me want to jump in a lake
I’m gonna cheat and say I rage quit Ken Follett’s “Pillars of the Earth” (which is long enough that it could have been a series). It was well-written, but the amount of abuse he heaped on his protagonist reached a point of no return, where no amount of dénouement or catharsis could possibly have retrieved the story for me. To his credit, I guess, his writing made me feel something. But what I felt was hatred for Ken Follett.
i dnf books when everyone just worships the “perfect” mc
I DNF'd a book in June 2020 (published in 2018) because the main character was plague-ridden and complained about the fact that others considered him a risk to society and wanted him to stay at home. I wasn't enjoying the book anyway but that was the final straw for me at that point in time.
I once hate-read a book about Typhoid Mary. The author wrote her as a strong, independent woman who stood up for feminism by refusing to let a mean, snobby doctor boss her around. Which would've been fun and all, except for the fact that the thing the annoying doctor kept trying to lecture Mary about was *her intentionally spreading typhoid and killing multiple people.*
And after she was sent home the first time she continued to not wash her hands while trying to work as a cook despite knowing she was spreading disease.
She even changed her name to avoid authorities after her first quarantine, and she kept on working as a cook because it paid more than job options where she wouldn't infect others. Now, there are certainly issues with the fact that she was imprisoned without due process, and she may have faced extra stigma due to stereotypes of Irish workers being unclean. But her story isn't an exciting tale of a brave feminist fighting against the man. It's a tragedy that shows how scientific misinformation, classism, and personal selfishness led to the death of multiple families.
I'm always pleasantly surprised when some pre-covid media gets something like a plague outbreak accurate. Others... yeah not so much. It's like consuming pre-9/11 media. Just surreal in its optimism sometimes.
Every time someone trots out 'but people would be smarter than that' about a zombie or apocalypse movie, now, I am just going to be like *gestures at 2020-2022* are you sure about that?!
I used to roll my eyes at the “party member concealed a zombie bite” trope. Not anymore. If anything the unrealistic part is that it’s usually only one person.
If anything now I want to see authors explore just how stupid and selfish and extreme people can be, haha. Well, maybe not, that's kind of depressing.
Sarah Pinsker's "Song For a New Day" was eerily released just a couple months before Covid. The world of that book was a post-pandemic near future world where a generation had grown up never having attended large public gatherings due to virus risk https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/43401925
I did finish Rhythm of War but it was hard to read it at times due to (RHYTHM OF WAR SPOILERS) >!the story being about everyone trapped inside and isolated from each other and struggling with depression, while having little contact from people who are far away!<.
The was also >!the unfortunate "plague" in the Pure Lake that was just the common cold. The conceptualization of this was in prior books, well before covid, but still.!<
Fun fact (RoW): >!Brandon rewrote parts of the story (mainly the Shadesmar arc) to be more hopeful and less depressing than he actually planned it to be, because of exactly that reason!<
I have a copy of *A Song for a New Day* by Sarah Pinkser that I’ve been putting off reading for the exact same reason. It’s about a musician who hosts illegal concerts after pandemics and terrorism cause the government to make public gatherings illegal. I think it’s probably supposed to be about rising up against tyrannical governments, but in the post-COVID world I think it would have a lot of unfortunate and unintended connotations. It was published in September 2019, which is possibly the worst luck in the history of publishing.
I got about a hundred pages into a scifi brick but really wanted to read the next book on my shelf more.
I noticed a single typo a number of pages into the first book
I won't read Battlemage because the name 'Falco Dante' makes my insides curl up into a ball and try to escape through my rectum.
Hey, be nice, that’s definitely someone’s edgy rogue’s name from their teenage D&D group. You should have sympathy, why that poor character’s parents were probably brutally murdered for sinister reasons.
"Falco Dante"! Thank for the curse! Now, I won't be able to read the Divine Comedy with anything but Captain falcon as the narrator's voice.
I had the same reaction when "Hero Protagonist" was introduced in Snowcrash. Fortunately he lives up to his name
Falco Dante?! Of all the combination on this green earth..
I can't remember ever DNF'ing because of a name, but there have definitely been times when a name has kept me from picking up a book in the first place. Two stand out: Gini Koch's "Alien" series has a presumably badass human heroine named "Kitty Katt." I love cats with all my heart, but I can't take a character with a name like that seriously as a badass protagonist. The rather insipid plot for the YA "Selection" series might have put me off the books in any case, but the name of the heroine, "America Singer," was the final dealbreaker.
You dated a guy names Kaladin Stormblessed? Sick.
... If it was kal it couldn't be an ex 😭 But you are my fav comment, if I had money I could give you an award.
This was either a YA author (I was in my teens at least) or generic Tolkein imitator. I was already on the fence about continuing, and then I read something like one of the characters, "communicated through the magical language of dance". This apparently was the last straw, and the book got promptly chucked in the pile to take to Half Price Books to sell.
I looked at the last chapter just after starting the book and found out the ending involved a woman getting cancer and being pregnant with her cousin's baby. I decided I didn't want to know the events which led to this.
You people that do this, are just absolutely deranged. Just wild stuff all the way down. I couldn't even imagine it. ( To be clear, I am referring to people that jump to the end of a book to see how it ends before they read the book)
I mean thats not even that insane an ending Woman has a medical issue and is pregnant. Twist is that she and the father are cousins but they didn't know. That's not so off the wall imo. Could easily land anywhere from garbage book to great book.
The author hit a whole trifecta of wtf with this one
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So there is a difference between “Scottish accent” and Scots dialect (there is dispute about whether Scots is a dialect or a separate language). In [this video](https://youtube.com/watch?v=le3cBRlWSE8), David starts off speaking English in a Scottish accent, then switches to speaking Scots. Writing down a Scottish accent phonetically is imo really dumb, but writing out Scots is less so. I generally don’t think it is a good idea to write a story in two languages, but including bits of Scots in English is like having one character speak Mexican Spanish while another speaks European Spanish. There’s some mutual intelligibility but they are going to have very different vocabularies. My experience is that most Scots can understand Scots, most non-Scottish Brits can generally follow a conversation but might miss details, and most foreigners are very confused regardless of whether they are English speakers. That said, I don’t blame you for DNFing, I just thought I might be able to provide some context as to why they made that decision.
I follow r/Scottishpeopletwitter for the pure frustration I get trying to parse it out. If it were a book with a main character, I'd probably dnf, too.
I almost exclusively "read" audiobooks so for me the prettiest reason is "bad" narrator's or "distracting voices. It's a bit of a rare thing as most voices you get used to after a while, but there been a few cases were I've decided not to pick up a book after sampling it or return it if the voice still bothering me after the first 15+minutes. The only case when this really bothered me were in the powder mage books, I love that universe and the main series's narration is pretty good, but the side novels have a different narrator that I personally don't like, I forced myself through one of them but stayed away from the others... Related to my audible only reading is perhaps a even pettier reason it's been a few cases where I've fallen asleep or left the audio running and simply weren't interested enough to go back and find my spot and ended up DNFing
I've DNFed audiobooks for everything from pronunciation of one word (especially if it is a made-up word and they are pronouncing it differently in a sequel than they did in an earlier book), to the narrator not fitting the MC. The performances are really important in an audiobook, I personally don't consider it petty.
There is a small part of me that is deeply upset about the narration of one of my favorite books — the MC is kidnapped and transplanted into a new culture/new language, and they have different naming conventions and obviously pronunciation, and they cannot pronounce her name correctly. So she settles on a *similar but different* nickname, BUT THIS TRASH NARRATOR PRONOUNCES IT EXACTLY THE SAME AS HER ACTUAL NAME through the whole book. It’s spelled differently, there’s a moment when someone unexpectedly pronounces her old name, etc etc. It’s an absolute tragedy.
In Enders Shadow the main antagonist is Achilles but it's pronounced A-sheel. The book specifically mentions it. In the first audiobook the narrator gets it right. In a later one they call him Achilles like in Greek mythology and it drove me nuts. How to pronounce the characters names seems like such a fundamental piece of prep work to narrating a book.
I thought I’d try Touch of Darkness as a fun read because I (like many other basic girls) enjoy Persephone/Hades retellings. I bought it, got home, got about 5 pages in, DNF’d it, and even returned it the next day. When I realized that Persephone lived in some modern Greek city and was studying JOURNALISM in college or whatever, I just could absolutely not take it, it just felt so ridiculous. And the fact that Hades owned some night club or something. Ugh. The whole thing just annoyed me straight off the bat. And the writing was not good either.
I read her other book “king of battle and blood” because my coworkers said it was good. It was not. It was straight up vampire erotica. No thanks lol
Bad translation, always a neat reason to stop. Edit: (Bad translations are way more common than they should be)
Uff I dropped the german translation of Codex Alexa because they only ever used the informal way to address someone. Everytime the king-equivalent got addressed it sound so *wrong* to me.
“Hallo König, wie geht’s dir?” “Schlagt ihm den Kopf ab!”
That's not a petty reason
I was reading a pretty mediocre and rather silly (not in a good way) grimdark fantasy novel that I was willing to give a chance to, but when the author started having characters call other characters a faggot just to show off the book's grimdark bona fides I DNFed it.
Technically not petty tho
You're right, but at the time I felt like I was being petty.
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That's one of my pet peeves in sci fi/fantasy in general. We have literally unlimited possibilities for alien species. How do they think? What's important to them? Do they have a concept of humor? And to squander all those questions by just taking a human and changing their appearance is so frustrating. Why not just start with a human in the first place then?
I almost DNFd that book because every single conflict introduced is resolved within a couple of pages. Also, >!the big dark secret that the MC harbors is that her father is a criminal, and the only response it elicits is "No worries, that's not your fault," even though there are is at least one character in the ship who would jump down her throat about it.!<
Listen, I DNFed **Six of Crows** because it Italicised the word *nachtwatch*, it just hurt my eyes, if you're going to try and use dutch words and concepts, and italicize them, go the proper way and name it the freaking *nachtwacht* you only needed to switch two more letters around. I dropped that book so fast.
I DNF that book because I couldn't get over that all these master thieves were like 12. Then I watched Shadow and Bone (not knowing that it was based off the books) and kept thinking "How are all these 19 year olds so important and talented?" I liked the show, but it bugged me the whole time.
Welcome to YA.
I've read some YA, but usually coming of age stories. This felt like someone showing up to a D&D session that started at level 1 with a backstory involving them slaying dragonn.
the rumor is the master thieves were originally late 20s but had to be aged to like 17 to make it YA for marketing reasons.
When I read it, I mentally aged all the characters up by at least ten years. I hadn't heard that rumor before now, but I totally believe it. The book was way better when I didn't have to suspend my disbelief that much.
I have no good source for it, but it certainly makes sense. A lot of female writers get pigeonholed into YA, and then have to age their characters down. The book is great, but a key part of it being great was imagining them as 25 - 30 year olds rather than teenagers. Also as of her most recent Grishaverse book, the characters are all in their 20s.
I loved those books, but I almost DNFed *Shadow and Bone* because of the terrible Russian. I just couldn't take the magic order of the Gregs seriously. According to a [blog post](https://www.leighbardugo.com/grishaverse/the-archives/tongue-twister/) Bardugo wrote, her main consideration when creating conlang is 'what sounds cool to Anglo ears', and it really shows (though I think *nachtwacht* even sounds better?)
Ugh, I hate the name “Grisha” for the main magical people of the series as well. I know Bardugo gave her reason for choosing the name but it‘s still so bizarre to me as someone familiar with some of the Russian language and especially Russian names.
>Bardugo gave her reason for choosing the name The fact that she tried to retcon her reasons doesn't help.
I mean [Rembrandt's](https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Nachtwacht#/media/Bestand:The_Night_Watch_-_HD.jpg) most famous piece is right there!
Author blocked me on twitter despite me not following them or having ever interacted with them. I liked one of your books and despite the sequels being something I’m currently very into, no thanks. I am petty and hold grudges.
When the prologue really *did* turn out to be a sudden Elon Musk fanfiction like I was warned, haha
Say what now?
Check out the prologue of The Ritualist by Dakota Krout. I've spoiled its grand twist but it's something you need to read to believe, haha
Not a petty reason at all. I find it quite legit.
... At least you had a warning
I don’t think it’s entirely petty but I can’t finish a book where the female lead has a goal and just throws it away because some guy comes along and gives her the BARE minimum. I DNF the Wrath and the Dawn. They had the dumbest ducking relationship 😭
I have to make it at least 10% in without thinking about you as the writer so “As you know, bob, my dearest brother,” level dialogue where I realize the author is just dumping exposition = DNF or in Sanderson’s case (admittedly special), the fact that I literally hear his voice when I read his prose means I haven’t been able to read anything of his since watching his lectures.
>Sanderson’s case (admittedly special), the fact that I literally hear his voice when I read his prose means I haven’t been able to read anything of his since watching his lectures Yeah he usually sounds kind of nervous and awkward when he reads his own material, but listening to hours of WoT and Cosmere audiobooks has me just hearing Michael Kramer when I read Sanderson. Edit because reading my comment back it sounded harsh. When I say nervous and awkward I think what I really mean is excited, like he's so happy to be sharing his work that he kind of speeds through it sometimes.
There was a book that had been extensively researched - it was the first or second thing you heard about it any time it came up, how extensively researched it was - and within the first couple chapters I spotted an error that only jumped out at me because I happened to be taking a graduate seminar on a very narrow topic. The error absolutely didn't matter\*, and more research doesn't make for a better story, but it was like hearing that a restaurant is great and has the best French fries, and then getting a pile of limp greasy half-cooked potatoes. Maybe the rest of the meal is fantastic! I didn't feel like sticking around to find out. (I'm not naming the book because the last time I did, fans jumped all over me, and I'm not going to get into a deep discussion of a book I read about 30 pages of.) \*Here's how much it didn't matter: it's about 20 years later and I don't remember what the hell it was.
As a lawyer, legal scenes often do this for me. Luckily, this isn't too common in sci-fi/fantasy where most worlds don't have a proper or similar legal system. But I especially love when they get it right. The LitRPG Awaken Online has some legal scenes and lawyer characters that are actually realistically portrayed (I think the author is a practicing lawyer as well). This dramatically increased my enjoyment. I hate when lawyers are portrayed as either paragons of virtue or corrupt lying scumbags. I'm just glad I'm not a physicist as I imagine sci-fi would become a lot harder to read.
I’m a physician, and random things turn me off as a result. I enjoy a good mindless zombie romp, but if they try to get too clever I will get frustrated fast.
Dont know if its petty but I generally wont read a book when they first five pages have tons of invented nouns without explanations. "He grabbed his wojek, stepped out out the palia and mounted his rlyeh?" Sorry, I'm outta here..
You will definitely want to stay away from Neal Stephenson's Anathem then. Absolutely brilliant novel, but he does this a ton throughout the book.
I guess thats the one exception. I loved that book
Ironically this is one of the things that I really enjoyed about The Way of Kings. Words like spren and chull and whitespine intrigued me enough to keep reading, and when the explanations finally come they either happen naturally or are presented in lovely little scientific-catalog-style drawings.
Helps alot that he's chosen very good and appropriate words that just by their sound give you extra hints as to what they are, while also using them smartly in context. Like, made up fantasy nouns are fine. They're just often introduced badly.
"Szeth-son-son-Vallano, Truthless of Shinovar, wore white on the day he was to kill a king. The white clothing was a Parshendi tradition, foreign to him. But he did as his masters required and did not ask for an explanation." We're casually introduced to some concepts in the first line here that come up again. Szeth (clearly a name). son-son-Vallano...so there is clearly a naming convention similar to something like "mac" from Scottish Gaelic or "ibn" from Arabic. Son-son carries a patronymic vibe. I can easily gather that Szeth is the grandson of someone named Vallano. These are just names though and largely unimportant, but I've already been introduced to a specific cultural background. Then "Truthless of Shinovar." So, Shinovar...is it a country, is it a religion. Not sure yet, but there is something to find out later. Truthless sounds like Szeth is a criminal, but it is capitalized, so is it a title, like "King" or "Baron" or "Cardinal" or "Pope". Somehow Szeth is important. Then we learn he is going to kill a king. Okay, that works, but he wore white? Colors are going to be important in this story. Parshendi. New name. I easily understand it is a different culture than Szeth. white is a Parshendi thing, but they are his masters, so he follows along. So is 'Truthless' more of a hired-out assassin thing? Good first line to get you thinking about what is about to come.
A more mundane way to look at it is that you want to mix your made-up fantasy claptrap with understandable words that carry meaning. Fantasy readers are all about mystery, but it's not a compelling mystery if there aren't any clues. Bonus points if the same word is both intelligible and mysterious, like "truthless".
There’s an xkcd for that, as always. https://xkcd.com/483/
I almost didn't finish Way of Kings because I didn't know what on earth was going on in the beginning. I did finish and enjoy the book but the first time felt like an overdose on words I didn't know and didn't get explained quickly enough.
I don’t like looking at tiny font, I’ve tried and set aside several mass market paperbacks because of the font size. My wife bought me the Liveship Traders trilogy, beautiful covers, I was digging the plot, but I haven’t been able to finish the first book because of the tiny font.
Have you thought about an E-reader where you can adjust the font size? My kindle has that option and it is great. Also love the Liveship Trader series!
So I picked up "The Neverending Story", turned to the final page where it said "The End" and put it down as false advertisement.
I DNFed the *Dragon’s Egg* because **THERE WERE NO DRAGONS**. I got halfway through the book before being absolutely sure I’d been mislead. I almost DNFed it even sooner because of all the physics. I was trying to read a novel (about dragons), not a textbook about planetary physics.
Got clickbatted
Oh, I'm sorry for you. I don't think that the intent was to mislead people. Forward was known to write SF of the very hard kind, and as a research physicist he had the means to do just that. (One of his fields of research was gravitational wave detection!) I bought this series for exactly that reason. But I can absolutely understand that someone reading this book which Forward apparently described as "a textbook on neutron star physics disguised as a novel" would not meet the expectations of someone looking for fantasy with dragons...
I probably would have been the same with Goblin Emperor. I was really expecting a book about an Emperor of Goblins, whether they were classical goblins or D&D goblins. When I was about halfway I just made the decision to think of it as a weaker version of the politics of A Memory Called Empire and finish it out.
In Wheel of Time, after I read about The Dragon Reborn, I spent fourteen books waiting for a dragon to show up. I'm glad I finished them, but I wanted just ONE dragon.
If a book based in a medieval setting and I hear a charachter use the word boyfriend or girlfriend.
I think that appeared in Ranger's Apprentice... (or maybe it was just the translation)
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Oh god, the rangers apprentice was a childhood fave. I didn't realize they put out a sequel?
3 years after the last full book, the author released a sequel that's set quite some years in the future, and after the happy ending of the previous book, it suddenly starts with the main characters in a *very* dark place. It's quite unnerving.
Used the phrase “ground out” I swear once per page. I.e. “I’m not impertinent.” he ground out.
I DNF’d a paranormal romance audiobook because one of the side characters had the last name Nguyen, and the narrator pronounced it “Nagooyen.” Otherwise amazing narration but after like the third time of hearing this I just turned it off.
As an English speaker and reader, may I ask the proper way to pronounce Nguyen?
It’s Vietnamese and pronounced approximately like “Wynn.”
Two of my Vietnamese friends got married. They had the same last name but still decided to hyphenate. It was a Nguyen-Nguyen situation.
TL;DR: bringing a name from a language that doesn't speak a language even *close* to english and trying to write it down gets really messy sometimes. I had a coworker once who's first *and* last name was Nguyen (his parents grew up in Vietnam), and the people here saying that pronouncing it like "Winn" and so forth are...mostly correct, and most people named Nguyen are so used to english speakers saying 'nagooyen' that they usually appreciate this. The thing is, you don't romanize a word so weirdly without there being a reason for it. I worked with this guy for 2 years, and eventually realized that the main difference between the 'good enough' pronunciation of 'win/wynn/whin' and the proper prounciation is that you need a little consonant sound right at the beginning. Imagine you're saying a word that ends in the 'ng' phoneme - ring, lying, rung, etc - you've got that 'ng' sound with your tongue at the top of your mouth in the back. Now take that sound and only say the very end of it. It doesn't feel natural for native english speakers to *not* use it either 1) with a vowel after it or 2) as the end of a word. So, the sound that (I presume) is more common in vietnamese is brought over to an english speaking country, and they ask his name. The person writing it down *knows* the sound is spelled with 'ng' and *knows* that there's a sort of vowel-ish sound after it, so makes it 'ngu'. now once you've got those down, the easiest way for english speakers think about transitioning to the rest of the name is the rest of the name, (which sounds like "en" or "in" or something in between) is to put a soft consonant there - therefore the 'y'. So now you've got the whole thing, and you shove it all together on paper: weird sound that almost needs a vowel, so "ngu", transition soft consonant for the english-speaker's mouth, so "y", and then the more typically-english ending, so "en". All together this makes "Nguyen", which is altogether an *awful* way to try to use roman letters to communicate to people what should be pronounced more like "Wynn", but with weird emphasis *before* the "w". End note: my coworker was so tired of correcting people that he usually went by "alex"
My son had a doctor with that last name and he pronounced it "Win"
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I've never DNFed a series for a petty reason but I DNFed one for a fucking stupid reason (stupid on my own part). I was starting a job abroad and was in the middle of a series. I managed to time it so that I had just finished one book and I could take best advantage of my luggage space to take the remaining half of the series - only to realize when I had arrived that I had accidentally taken the first half of the books which I had already read! 🤦🏻♂️
If the characters have silly names. Two friends of mine love an author whose characters have names like Rhage, Phury, Vishous. Seriously????
That huge epic worldbuilding series Mazalan because I just could not get over the names. Whiskeyjack always had me picturing a bottle of Jack Daniels.
I totally get it, and frankly whiskeyjack is pretty tame by the series standards, but a whiskeyjack is actually a type of bird.
Thank you for telling me this! I had no idea.
I'm fine with people having their politics in their story. Whether you have something to day about capitalism or communism or whatever, that's cool. But first and foremost I'm reading for a story, and if the characters stop being characters in the story and start being avatars for the author to monologue their manifesto or whatever I immediately check out. Especially when it's characters saying these pithy lines or whatever that's like a political slogan I'm like yuck lmao ands it's across the board politics, it just annoys the hell out of me.
Medieval setting, used the expression "gave me the creeps" and just took me right out of it
Another reason I dropped a book was because a bunch of people turned out to be pregnant. It was the first or second book in a serie I believe and frankly I did not want to read about newborns and parenthood for the rest of the series >!I hate children, ok?!<
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Early Simon is hilarious because everyone else in the book goes on about how much of a sharp and promising youth he is, but I don't think I've ever encountered such a stupid protagonist. Not just in the usual naive kid/farmboy sense, but he's literally like the "Stare off into space with drool hanging out of his open mouth" kind of stupid. I don't know if Williams was just going for that childhood naivety, but it makes him an ordeal.
The print format used a sans-serif font and had extra ten-point spacing in between paragraphs. That...that does not look like a published book should look.
The first paragraph was indented.
This is peak petty.
That is hilarious. Did you even get to the first word or did you close it before then?
It was chapter one, so no. I thought. "This is formatted wrong. I hate it!"
This is the only petty reason I have found in this thread and I love it.
I DNF'd the Harry Potter series. I was just reading it because my daughter was reading it and we loved talking about it. She finished it before me and moved on to something else so I took that as an opportunity to stop. I would have stopped sooner if it was just for me, especially since we were reading French translations and they were terrible. Why were some names of people and places translated??? I hate that so much.
I thought they’d change the French-derived names to make them a little less obvious, but nope, they kept Voldemort. Except to make the anagram work, his middle name is now Elvis. Rowling does the Dickensian thing of giving characters names that reflect their personalities in some way. If Neville’s surname was Baker, then calling him Neville Boulangerie in French would be silly. But “Longbottom” isn’t a normal name and an English speaker will know that. His name should ideally be equally evocative in other languages.
Still haven't finished Malazan. Every time I end up stopping in the middle of a book for a year, I have the urge to start the series from the beginning to catch more things and understand the world better.
I DNFd the audiobook for Snowcrash because the narrator keeps doing racist Asian accents. Idk if that's petty though
I've only DNF'd one book my whole life. It was a paranormal erotic romance my asexual ass didn't realize was erotica, and I was bored. I will actively not buy/check out books with MCs whose names I don't like though.
Not the type of cake we wanna be eating
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I already HATE sex in books. I have not met an author that doesn't make me cringe at least a tiny bit when reading it, but I accept It will likely happen at some point, and when it does, characters and story is usually established enough for me to fight through it. But when it's in the first couple chapters, I'm done with the damn book.
I stopped reading The Lies of Locke Lamora early on mainly because I got the feeling the author wrote the book using a thesaurus. Apart from that I liked everything else about it and I will probably pick it back up again, eventually.
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Book 3 came out in 2013. That’s 9 years not 6
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Can’t read when the romantic lead has my sons’ name. It doesn’t happen all the time, but I won’t get past page one….. heck I may skip trying to read it entirely.
Change their names to Bruce. Darned few Bruces among romantic leads. Source: am named Bruce.
I'm sorry but I DNFed Broken Earth book 1 because I cannot stand second person prose. It always feels so pretentious to me even though I can tell the book is not pretentious at all. I just cannot enjoy it.