Sorry Shakespeare. When I thought about writing this post, this is the title my brain just incessantly repeated on a loop and now you must suffer it, too.
I’ve talked a bit over the last couple of years about the power of the dnf. The quite clunky online abbreviation of ‘did not finish’ that started as a tag you might use on Goodreads and has now made the full transformation into an actual verb (again, sorry).
Like many other readers with a completist complex probably born out of the desire to appear well-read (and therefore dragging myself through a list of ‘good books’) and/or a deep-seated fear of missing out on something great by giving up too soon, for a long time I really struggled to dnf books. What if the book got good in the last fifty pages? Can I contribute to the conversation around a buzzy novel if I didn’t even finish it? How can I have a half-finished book just sitting on my shelf, shaming me?
And then, like many voracious readers before me, I suddenly saw the light.
We have in our lives such a limited number of books we’ll be able to read, and there’s no point wasting time on ones we clearly don’t like. Reading novels is a time-consuming hobby. Each one will take hours and hours of our increasingly squeezed free time. Why waste it? There’s nothing that will put you off reading faster, either, than trying to slog through a book you aren’t enjoying. I think my newfound ability also came from an increased confidence; there was a pattern here, I could almost always tell if I wouldn’t like a book overall by the first fifty pages (to be honest these days I’d get it right down to the first five).
In my series about becoming a reader, I’ve championed the dnf. And I still wholeheartedly agree with my former self… but. Yes, there’s a but. I know you sensed it coming. Like a pendulum that has swung all the way in one direction, I have found myself reflecting lately on dnf-ing, and swinging back, at least to something that looks a bit less extreme. When is it not so clear cut? Are there other things to keep in mind beyond ‘I’m not enjoying this, so I’m going to put it down’?