Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Books That I Should Have Quit

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature created by the team over at The Broke and The Bookish. This week’s theme is ten bookish things I want to quit or have quit. So what I’ve decided to feature today are ten books that I finished reading, but should have quit or DNFed. I actually rarely DNF books (and I haven’t DNFed anything this year) but in hindsight, these are the ones I should have given up on. All of these books received 1 to 2.5 stars from me.

1. 99 Days – Katie Cotugno

This book had the most frustrating characters and plot. The main character, Molly, makes the same mistakes over and over again. By about page 100, I realised that she was repeating the same mistakes that drove her out of town in the first place but I was hoping that she’d redeem herself. Unfortunately, that never happened and the book pretty much ended where it began.

2. The Replacement Wife – Rowena Wiseman

It was obvious from the first paragraph that this novel (novella?) had terrible writing. But I was hoping that the plot would be interesting enough for me to overlook it. Sadly, the plot was terrible and the main character makes one bad decision after another. She was selfish and annoying and it was pretty hard for me to deal with her. I ended up finishing the book because it was only about 150 pages long but the ending was also very unsatisfying.

3. Starry Night – Isabel Gilles

A couple of pages into the book, it became apparent that I wasn’t going to connect with the writing. It sounded very juvenile and the characters also did not act their age. I persisted, but the plot didn’t do anything for me. There were so many unnecessary things that happened in the book and none of it was very original either (to be fair, it’s a contemporary so not many things can be original… but you know what I mean).

4. The Selection – Kiera Cass

I don’t think I need to elaborate on this one. I only continued because I had already bought all three of the books in the trilogy. Plus there’s something very addictive about crappy and underdeveloped plots.

5. Ulysses – James Joyce

My problem with this book was the writing. I found it super hard to understand what was going on and there were so many stream of consciousness sections! I had to refer to summaries online after each chapter to make sure I was following. Besides the difficulty I had understanding the text, the rest of it was pretty good. It was a bit long and draggy at times because this beast of a book is all set within 24 hours.

6. Even When You Lie To Me – Jessica Alcott

This book really bored me. This book was sectioned off into months and we got to see what happened to the main character each month of the year. I found this to be so problematic because there were some months where nothing happened, but we still got a whole chapter on it! The main character is very negative and self-deprecating and I hated reading from her perspective. I should have DNFed this because I had no idea what I was supposed to have taken away from the book after I finished it.

7. Fans of the Impossible Life – Kate Scelsa

To be fair, there was nothing that gave me ‘DNF alerts’ while I was reading this novel. Most of the problems I had with it were the messages (see my linked review for my rant). But I really disliked the writing style of this book. It was written from three different perspectives and each perspective was written in a different person narration. I didn’t understand the point of it.

8. Love Hurts – Malorie Blackman

This is a collection of short stories curated by Malorie Blackman. After the first couple of stories, I realised that this was a collection of excerpts from previously published works! There were about 25 stories in this anthology, but only a handful of them were original short stories! Some of the excerpts were unnecessarily long and some were only a page long. I felt really cheated.

9. Risk – Fleur Ferris

This was another book that had writing that I couldn’t connect with. The main character’s voice was very juvenile and I thought the characters didn’t act their age. I kept persisting because this was the first ever book for #bookclubaus but I really didn’t like this book very much.

10. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl – Jesse Andrews

I didn’t find this book to be funny at all. I couldn’t connect with Greg, the main character and I didn’t like Earl or the dying girl very much either. I just found this novel to be very boring.

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Do you have any books that you wish you had quit?