Welcome to the first blog post in my 2023 reading wrap up series. In today’s blog post, I will take you through the 6 books that I DNFed – Did Not Finish – in 2023. Some of these books weren’t bad. They just either weren’t for me or I wasn’t in the mood and it wasn’t the right time for me to read them.
A couple of quick reminders here:
- It’s okay for you to leave a book halfway through for whatever reason. You don’t have to sit through a book you’re not enjoying. There are far too many books and way too little time to do that.
- The decision to leave these books mentioned here was mine. It is not meant as a personal affront to you if these happen to be your favorite books. They just didn’t work for me.
I’m also making a series of 2023 reading wrap up videos on YouTube and have put up a video where I talk about the books I DNFed in 2023. If you’d like to go check that out instead, here’s where you can find it: Books I DNFed in 2023 – Video.
1. More by Hakan Günday
This is the story of a boy and his father who are in the business of transporting people across the Aegean Sea to Greece. The father is a cruel man, perhaps roughened even more by the fact that he is a human trafficker, and this rubs off on the young boy, who is called Gaza. When things change for the worse one night, a question mark comes to rest on Gaza’s own future existence, filling him with a fear and desperation that probably pushes the teenager to behave as mindlessly as he does.
While the premise, of showing the desperate lives of refugees fighting to live, to escape their homes to what Europe promises, is great, it is the tinier details that I was repulsed by. That night when things change, Gaza is buried under a mountain of corpses and he sees a naked woman’s body, his reaction to which is immediately to go at it. I understand that people are capable of such things and worse, and that it is part of reality, but it wasn’t something I was prepared to sit through. Which is why I gave up on the book halfway through the ‘story’.
2. The Memory Librarian by Janelle Monae & Others
This was a book I’d been super excited to read because it was a book adaptation of Janelle Monae’s album, The Dirty Computer. I knew of her as an actor and I knew she was a singer and how much people loved her and her work. So when I saw this one available at the library, a collection of science fiction short stories she wrote with a few other writers, I jumped at the chance to read it. And you know that sometimes, jumping at a chance means that you’ll get your nose broken. That’s exactly what happened with me.
I got through about 85 or 90 pages in this book before I gave up, because the science fiction part of the story was trumped and beaten into oblivion by a brand of writing that is utterly taken in with itself. It takes itself way too seriously and tries entirely too hard to be enigmatic, and in that process loses connection between even the first line on a page and its last line. This gave me a headache, like all writing that has that hint of pretension in its undertones does.
3. The Book of (More) Delights by Ross Gay
Taken from my October 2023 reading wrap up.
This is a sequel to Ross Gay’s earlier book, The Book of Delights, and is similarly a collection of essays in which the author talks about his everyday delights. Some are random, some are well thought out, some make you nostalgic, some put a big smile on your face, and some others will make you wonder if everyone in the world is living the exact same life. Many are heartwarming and will settle in your heart for eternity. But the writing felt disjointed to me, like the author kept stacking on things he kept remembering to the ends of sentences.
That put me off, bringing me to a grinding halt at 81%. The afterthought-style is so overwhelming that despite me being close to finishing the book, I just couldn’t go on.
4. Pockets by Hannah Carlson
In this book, Hannah Carlson takes us through the history and evolution of pockets, its connection to feminism, how it started as an external purse but was included into garments, historical incidents and literary references to these extremely functional parts of everyday clothes, and more. While the premise itself is fantastic – because as us women have been shouting from the rooftops for years, pockets are important! – the writing is too academic for my liking. It is stiff with no easy flow and sentence structure. Instead, it begs for the reader to delineate between important facts, examples, and embellishments, which in my opinion, only shrinks the readership instead of its intended goal of reaching more people.
I gave up 18% into the book, although I think that it probably wouldn’t be this bad – I might love it even – if I were reading a physical copy of it.
5. The House in the Pines by Ana Reyes
This was a book that I was so excited about because of the hype that it got, including getting picked by Reese’s Book Club, but it taught me well enough not to ALWAYS believe the hype. There was that one part of my gut that was telling me not to read it because maybe I wouldn’t like it. But did I listen? Nah. What else did we learn from this experience, then? Yes, exactly. That we should always listen to our guts. Especially when it comes to books like this.
The House in the Pines is supposed to be a mystery in which a woman sets out to find answers related to her friend’s death. But all I got in the 76 pages that I was able to stand was this woman talking vaguely about her medications about her relationship with her mother. There isn’t a lot about the direction in which the story is going to go. And when a mystery is more matter-of-fact than mysterious, it takes the fun out of the story. Which is why, I gave up and DNFed the book.
6. Miss Kim Knows by Cho Nam Joo & tr. into English by Jamie Chang
This was my almost my last read for 2023 and my last DNF of the year as well. This is a collection of short stories, all about women, and written by Cho Nam Joo, the author of one of my 2022 favorites, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, and translated by Jamie Chang. I started this book, read the first story, got a little into the second before other priorities took over and I lost the mood for it. It isn’t a bad book. I might pick it up sometime in the future too. But it just wasn’t the right time for me to read it.
So that was my first 2023 reading wrap up in which I told you all about the books I did not finish in 2023. Have you read any of these books? Do you DNF? If yes, what books did you DNF in 2023? Let me know in the comments below. I’d love to hear from you!
I’ll see you in a new blog post, the next in my 2023 reading wrap up series.
Until next time, keep reading and add melodrama to your life! ❤
The Melodramatic Bookworm 
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