I have a confession that makes me squirm a little: there’s a stack of bookmarks on my nightstand, each one marking the exact page where I surrendered. Page 127 of The Goldfinch. Page 89 of Normal People. Page 203 of Infinite Jest. These aren’t books I hated—that would be easier to explain. These are books that everyone else seems to love, books that won awards and sparked passionate discussions, books that left me feeling like I was missing some crucial reading gene.
It took me years to admit that sometimes the problem isn’t the book. Sometimes it’s just not the right book for me, at this moment, in this phase of my reading life. But that realization came only after I stopped treating DNF (did not finish) like a moral failing and started examining what actually happens when a reader and a book don’t click.
When Beautiful Writing Feels Like Homework
Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch should have been catnip for me. Art history, grief, a coming-of-age story wrapped in gorgeous prose—all things I typically devour. But somewhere around page 127, I realized I was reading it like medicine, dutifully turning pages because I felt I should appreciate it, not because I wanted to know what happened next. Tartt’s sentences are undeniably beautiful, each one crafted with the precision of a master painter, but they felt so deliberate, so aware of their own beauty, that they pulled me out of the story rather than deeper into it.
This happens more often than I care to admit with literary fiction that wins major prizes. The writing is objectively excellent, but it feels performative in a way that makes me hyperaware I’m reading rather than living in the story. It’s like being at a dinner party with someone who’s clearly rehearsed every anecdote. Impressive, yes. Engaging for three hours? Not so much.
I’ve learned to recognize this feeling now, that subtle shift from absorption to obligation. When I catch myself calculating how many pages I have left rather than wondering what comes next, it’s usually time to bow out gracefully.
The Intimacy Problem
Sally Rooney’s Normal People broke me in a different way. The book opens with Marianne and Connell in high school, navigating the particular cruelty of teenage social dynamics, and I was immediately transported back to my own adolescent awkwardness. But then something strange happened: the intimacy Rooney creates between her characters felt so raw, so unfiltered, that reading it began to feel like eavesdropping on someone’s therapy session.
Rooney has an uncanny ability to capture the internal monologue of young people figuring out love and sex and power. Every misunderstanding between Marianne and Connell rang true, every moment of miscommunication felt painfully familiar. But that’s exactly why I couldn’t continue. The emotional precision was so acute it made me uncomfortable, like looking directly into someone else’s diary without permission.
Sometimes books hit too close to home, and that’s not necessarily a flaw in the book. It might just mean you’re not ready for what that particular story is offering. I set Normal People aside at page 89, not because it wasn’t good, but because it was too good at excavating feelings I wasn’t prepared to examine.
When Ambition Overwhelms Experience
David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest represents a different kind of surrender entirely. I approached it with the dedication of someone training for a marathon, armed with online reading guides and a notebook for tracking characters. I wanted to love it. I wanted to be the kind of reader who could handle Wallace’s maximalist approach, who could surf the waves of his sentences without drowning in footnotes.
For 203 pages, I gamely followed Wallace’s labyrinthine plot threads and philosophical tangents. There were moments of genuine brilliance, passages that made me stop and reread them just for the pleasure of experiencing that perfect combination of intellect and emotion. But ultimately, I felt like I was working harder than Wallace was to make the book cohere. The impressive technical skill couldn’t compensate for what felt like a fundamental lack of trust in the reader’s ability to find meaning without constant intellectual fireworks.
This kind of ambitious literary fiction often feels like it’s trying to prove something rather than tell something. The difference is subtle but important. When a book is trying to prove its own importance, I can feel the effort, and it exhausts me as a reader.
The Pacing Mismatch
Sometimes the issue is purely mechanical. I abandoned Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad not because I disliked her experimental structure or interconnected storylines, but because the pacing felt completely at odds with what I needed from a book at that moment in my life. Egan jumps between characters and time periods with the confidence of someone who knows exactly where she’s going, but I found myself constantly reorienting, working to keep track of who was whom and when we were.
This isn’t a criticism of Egan’s technique—the book won a Pulitzer, and I can see why. But I was reading it during a particularly chaotic period, when I needed fiction to be a refuge rather than a puzzle to solve. The book demanded a kind of active engagement I simply couldn’t give it at the time.
Pacing is deeply personal. What feels like a satisfying slow burn to one reader might feel sluggish to another. What feels like an exciting pace to one person might feel frantic to someone else. There’s no objective “right” pace for a novel, only the pace that works for each individual reader in each individual moment.
Making Peace with Unfinished Business
I used to feel guilty about these abandoned books, as if I’d failed them somehow. But I’ve come to see DNF as a form of reader self-awareness. Life is short, and there are too many books that will grab me from page one and never let go to spend time struggling through ones that don’t.
That said, I keep those bookmarks. Sometimes what doesn’t work for you at twenty-five works perfectly at thirty-five. Sometimes you need to be in a different emotional place, or have different reading experience under your belt, or simply be in a different season of life. The Goldfinch might be perfect for me in ten years. Normal People might hit differently when I’m further from my own messy young adulthood.
The beauty of being a reader is that the conversation between you and a book is always evolving. Today’s DNF might be tomorrow’s life-changing read. What books have you set aside, and what do you think they were asking of you that you weren’t ready to give?