November Group Read: First Check-In

[kalloway]

We're now nearly a week in! Have you finished or started anything? How are you feeling? (It is perfectly fine if the answers are "no", "nope", and "augh", of course.)


For added optional discussion, if you'd like- Do you ever DNF (Did Not Finish) books? If so, what makes you DNF something and when? Style? Content? Not grabbing you after x% of pages? Something else? Or are you the type of reader who finishes everything you start, no matter what? Have you changed your stance on this over time?

Comments

[sabcatt]

Help, how is it already nearly a week into the month… I haven’t read what I intended to be reading (Dragonlance Chronicles book 1, or a collection of short stories that I found abandoned in my dorm when I moved in, because I was like “surely the lower commitment required to read a 10-20 page story will make it easier for me to start”. Reader, it has not) but I did melt my brain doing ALLLLLL the art history readings I’ve been assigned so far, which has been 100+ pages, probably closer to 200 over the past 2 weeks. And I have a similar load in my historiography class that I need to catch up on… someone save me from academia, please.

I tend to DNF books either 10% or less of the way through, or 50% or more. If it doesn’t grab me from the start, I’m gone, but there are some books where there’s a tension between my enjoyment of the actual writing (low) and my desire to find out what happens next (usually high), and those books I’ll usually suffer through a lot or most of it before deciding that whatever the payoff is, it’s not worth the slog. I think I’d be a happier reader if I could convince myself to give up on books like that earlier, but I read because I like stories and I want to know how they’ll develop and turn out, so giving up on what I think will be a good story, even when the writing isn’t to my taste, goes somewhat against my nature.

[autumndaze]

Oof I've struggled on short story collections, too, I feel you :/ Congratz on the reading for school but I also hope you're able to do some reading for fun! I know what drowning in academic writing is like. Our professors used to tell us that if we liked to read, take time to do it and oof it was a struggle.