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

[autumndaze]

I've started and finished four books, including "The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System" Vol 4 (English) by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu. Loved it. It's a collection of post-story completion short stories and I hadn't read some of them before, and I was so happy to finally be able to have them all.

I read "Little Mushroom: Judgment Day" and "Little Mushroom: Revelations" by Shisi, a two-part post-apocalyptic science fiction danmei about a sentient mushroom on a quest to recover his spore. It is one of the most depressing things I've read in a while and also one of the fluffiest and I adore it. I read the entire thing in like 2 days lol

I read "Shuna's Journey"/"Shuna no Tabi" by Hayao Miyazaki, which is an emonogatari he wrote while writing the Nausicaa manga and planning the Earthsea film, and was published in 1983. It's reminiscent of Nausicaa in a lot of ways and Goro actually reused art and scenes from it for "Gedo Senki", while scenes, art, and characters in it also showed up in the "Princess Mononoke" film. I read it originally back in 2014, but it was finally officially published in English for the first time, and it's nice to be able to read it this way. Gorgeous little story. Really wonderful.

I've also been working through a lot of fanfics. Only finished 3 so far.

I definitely DNF books. They have to be... quite bad. I will stick it out through some absolutely miserable books sometimes. My rule tends to be "if I hate everyone in the story and want them all to die, probably it's time to stop reading/watching/listening", and that's what I use for all media. But well... The Witcher books, for instance, I read primarily for fanfiction research. I was tempted to quit many, many times. I tried rereading The Inheritance Cycle, barely scraped through Eragon, gave up on book 2, and gave up on Sea of Stars fairly early (though I did finish that horrible Hobbit/Dune rip-off short story collection he published recently). Absolutely horrible writing. I used to never DNF, and found it was destroying my desire to read. When I changed that, I actually started loving reading again. Being able to look at books as opportunities rather than commitments helped a LOT. But I do still tend to finish more than I don't, though. My large 1 star section on Goodreads is an unfortunate testament to that.