This post began life as a comment on a SBTB post about when we DNF (do not finish) a book.
I don’t DNF a lot of books, but then there are whole huge piles of the fiction world that I never pick up at all. 🙂 I’m more likely to say ‘eh the odds are against me liking this one’ and simply not buy it.
Also I read insanely fast.* I’ll start a typical romance novel at 6:00 after work and be done with it by 11:00 bedtime, including dinner, conversation with the husband, and watching something on TV. So something has to be really annoying before I’ll chuck it in.
When that happens, it’s usually at less than 20%. I’ll give the story a chance to kick in, give the characters a chance to redeem any initial side-eye, give the narrative voice a chance to overcome any OH PLEASE editing problems like ‘pouring’ over a document, or ‘reigning’ in his temper, or the streets ‘teaming’ with people.
There are also OH PLEASE style things like “It’s fine,” he spat or “Damn,” she cursed. So many dialogue tags simply do not need to be there, are a clumsy attempt to convey mood that typically signals other weaknesses, and/or may be just a way to plump up the word count.
There have been a few books that were moderately engaging up to the 80% mark (or later) and then pissed me the hell off. Once or twice I’ve stopped, metaphorically flinging them against the wall, but more often I’ll read grimly to the end because I’ve already invested most of the time and there’s always the chance the author will pull the situation out of the fire. I routinely remove downloads from my device after reading, but can recall only one book that I hated enough to permanently delete from my content. I mean, it was an offensive waste of my time.
I keep a reading journal because once I’ve written about something I tend to remember it, and this helps me purge my feelings about a book that went wrong for me while at the same time noting the things I liked about character, setting, etc., because sometimes I want to give the author another chance.
I will forgive a lot of style oddities for characters I love.
I tend to assume that a self-published book will be of equivalent quality to a traditionally-published book, only because I’ve read so many of the latter that are poorly constructed and edited. There are some self-published authors (like myself) who improve their writing over time, and some who don’t; thus if I come across a new author with good reviews I might choose the latest title rather than the earliest. 🙂 This might help with the DNF rate too!
*The 2021 count to date: 432 books read. Mostly full-length novels. Yeah, I know.