Reading Fail: The Remainder of the 2019 DNFs

Yipes, 97 DNFs this year – that’s roughly 22% of the books I started. Higher than my usual 15% average, suggesting that I’ve had trouble getting on with books that appealed for their subject matter or hype but didn’t live up to my expectations. (In the latter category, I’m thinking of It books of the year like The Man Who Saw Everything, The Starless Sea, Three Women, Trick Mirror and On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous.)

Following on from June’s post on the books I’d abandoned so far in 2019, here’s a list of the other DNFs I haven’t already written about, perhaps in a monthly Library Checkout post. No cover images, tags, links or full reviews here; just a text dump. Titles are in chronological order; the number of pages or percentage I read is generally given in brackets at the end.

Note: I encourage readers to give up on books they are not enjoying – at any time, but as early on as possible. You owe it to yourself to devote your limited, precious time to the books you’ll love and find worthwhile.

 

Stroke: A 5% Chance of Survival by Ricky Monahan Brown: Brown, a Scot in New York City, suffered a hemorrhagic stroke at age 38. I’m pretty oversaturated with medical memoirs; despite the breezy style and accessible details, this one doesn’t stand out. (104 pp.)

 

How to Catch a Mole: And Find Yourself in Nature by Marc Hamer: Hamer is a gardener and former molecatcher. This is a gentle natural history of the mole, as well as a meditation on our connections with a nature and a memoir of a life lived largely outdoors. But is it about atonement or not? (103 pp.)

 

The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux: I read up to when Theroux arrives in northern Italy. He mostly describes his fellow passengers, as well as the details of meals and sleeping arrangements on trains. The writing struck me as old-fashioned. (32 pp.)

 

What Dementia Teaches Us about Love by Nicci Gerard: I’ve read a lot of books about dementia, both clinical and anecdotal, and this doesn’t add anything new. (11%)

 

The Music Room by William Fiennes: Time to accept that I just don’t get on with Fiennes’s writing, even when the subjects seem tailor-made for me. (10 pp.)

 

Tisala by Richard Seward Newton: I guess I read a blurb and thought this was unmissable, but I should have tried to read a sample or some more reviews of it. I couldn’t imagine reading another 560+ pages. (6 pp.)

 

The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante: Alas, I do not appreciate Elena Ferrante’s work; this is a third try. I enjoyed the narrator’s voice well enough, and loved the scene in which her errant husband finds broken glass in his dinner, but had no interest in how this seemingly predictable story of the end of a marriage might play out. (25 pp.)

 

Breaking and Mending: A Junior Doctor’s Stories of Compassion and Burnout by Joanna Cannon: I’ve read so many doctors’ memoirs now, and this one doesn’t really cut the mustard: the writing is undistinguished and the tone as sentimental as I’ve come to expect from her fiction. (30 pp.)

 

Dunedin by Shena Mackay: After loving The Orchard on Fire, I thought I’d try another Mackay novel, and I was intrigued by the dual timeline of 1909 New Zealand and 1989 London. I kept thinking we were going to get links back to the historical chapter; I got bored of waiting. (189 pp.)

 

Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot by Mark Vanhoenacker: I thought it would be fascinating to read about flying from the perspective of a British Airways pilot. But this is more of an academic and philosophical study of flight and the modern condition of dislocation than a memoir of what it’s like to train to fly planes. (28 pp.)

 

Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry: At first these ageing Irish gangsters seem like harmless drunks, but gradually you come to realize just how dangerous they are. I loved the voices and if this was a short story it would have gotten a top rating, but I found I had no interest in the backstory of how these men got involved in heroin smuggling. (76 pp.)

 

The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind by David Guterson: I read “Angels in the Snow” (last Christmas) and “Wood Grouse on a High Promontory Overlooking Canada.” Both were fine but not memorable; a glance at the rest suggests they’ll all be about baseball and hunting. If I want to read stories about dudes hunting I’ll turn to Hemingway or David Vann.

 

The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy: There’s a lot of repetition and random details that seem deliberately placed to be clues. I’m sure there’s a clever story in here somewhere, but apart from a few intriguing anachronisms, there is not a lot of plot or character to latch onto. (35 pp.)

 

Inland by Téa Obreht: I made two attempts to get into this Western, but found it excruciatingly slow and couldn’t warm to any of the characters or convince myself of the accuracy of the period speech. This was disappointing as it was one of my most anticipated titles of the second half of the year and I loved The Tiger’s Wife. (37 pp.)

 

Our Place: Can We Save Britain’s Wildlife before It Is Too Late?, by Mark Cocker: I simply didn’t need this level of detail on the history of nature conservation in Britain. The personal writing about his patch of Norfolk engaged me a bit more. (60 pp.)

 

Better Off Bald: A Life in 147 Days by Andrea Wilson Woods: When Woods’s 13-years-younger sister Adrienne was diagnosed with liver cancer, it hit her hard. This didn’t pull me in, despite strong recreated dialogue and an extraordinary memory for events. I think it’s a combination of it being far too long and detailed, and feeling dated. (12%)

 

The Grassling: A Geological Memoir by Elizabeth-Jane Burnett: Burnett’s roots are in Ide, Devon and in Kenya. She has previously published poetry and is going for extreme lyricism in her nature writing, which at times makes it feel overwritten, especially in the prologue. (55 pp.)

 

The Man in the Red Coat by Julian Barnes: I completely misjudged this: I thought it would be historical fiction, but it’s actually narrative nonfiction about an obscure historical figure. I found it dull and impenetrable. A shame, as Barnes is a favorite author of mine. (9 pp.)

 

Loop by Brenda Lozano: The narrator, waiting for her boyfriend to come back from Spain, is explicitly likened to Penelope. She lets her mind wander at random, which leads to unrelated paragraphs about dwarves, David Bowie songs, her choice of notebooks, tiny things that happened to her, and so on. Not enough narrative to keep me interested. (35 pp.)

 

The Dream Life of Balso Snell by Nathanael West: I’m not sure I even made it past the second page. It’s even more bizarre and crass than I’m used to from him.

 

Whiskey When We’re Dry by John Larison: Larison has done a good job of approximating the voice of an unlettered young woman in the 1880s, but I found this quite slow and feel like I’ve read too many Westerns in the last few years. (50 pp.)

 

Dust Falls on Eugene Schlumburger / Toddler on the Run by Shena Mackay: Argh, another Mackay DNF! She wrote these two novellas when she was SEVENTEEN. I only managed a few pages of Dust, but got 40 pages into Toddler. It has an amusing premise but was only okay.

 

The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf: I couldn’t even tell you the basics of what happened. Some posh English people on a boat to South America? I could see that there were keen psychological insights, but no plot to speak of. (Did you know Mrs Dalloway is a character?!) Perhaps I’ll try this again someday, but it will require a concerted effort. (110 pp.)

 

Shelf Life by Livia Franchini: Reminiscent of Eleanor Oliphant: readable but blah. (40%)

 

The Complete Stories of Saki by Hector Hugh Munro: This was a follow-up bibliotherapy prescription for reading aloud. My husband and I read “Tobermory,” “Sredni Vashtar,” “The Easter Egg,” “Laura,” and “Tea.” The stories are very short and quite witty, but the language so advanced/old-fashioned that I found them rather like tongue-twisters.

 

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern: Like most of the rest of the world, I was enraptured with The Night Circus. This, however, felt like a knockoff of A Discovery of Witches and The Thirteenth Tale, with added geek and queer stylings. Passages from the book within a book failed to draw me in. (44 pp.)

 

The Glass Woman by Caroline Lea: I don’t know if it’s the time period and setting (17th-century Iceland), or the writing style, but I couldn’t get through Sally Magnusson’s The Sealwoman’s Gift either. The challenging names add to a feeling of foreignness that’s more bewildering than entrancing. (8 pp.)

 

Ghostwalk by Rebecca Stott: The idea of a ghostwriter being almost literally haunted by her subject is appealing, and I did find the writing atmospheric. However, the Isaac Newton and animal rights activism plots didn’t capture my attention. (126 pp.)

 

Three Flames by Alan Lightman: I’d enjoyed several Lightman books before, fiction and non-, but despite his nonprofit work with women in Southeast Asia, he doesn’t seem like the person to write this novel about women’s lives in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia. (50 pp.)

 

Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken: Quirk for quirk’s sake. Characters are found alive in a cemetery, killed by a flow of molasses, or expire by spontaneous combustion. What is supposed to unite this 19th-century community – a bowling alley – never comes to life. Another disappointment from my most anticipated titles of the year list. (153 pp.)

 

Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino: I read part of “Ecstasy,” her essay on belonging to a Texas megachurch in her high school years. The other topics, and the writing in general, didn’t interest me enough.

 

Idiot Wind by Peter Kaldheim: I requested this purely on the basis of an enthusiastic NPR review from an acquaintance. While there’s a lot of energy to this memoir of the author’s time as a New York City drug dealer/addict taking off on a cross-country road trip in the late 1980s, I should have known it wouldn’t be for me. (14 pp.)