OK, that sounds totally contradictory. DNF, BTW, is the abbreviation for “Did Not Finish.” Goodreads now lets you put those books on their own labelled shelf. Yeah, not doing that, and here’s why.
I’ve stared at the blank page. I’ve edited the bejeezus out of chapters and been dissatisfied with what remained. If we let our very smart writer selves run rampant, we’d never publish anything. So if I encounter a book that I want to like, and don’t, I put it down. Then I remove it from my Goodreads, and remain quiet about it. Because, maybe it wasn’t for me; I’m not the right audience. And because I’m on the other side of it all now as a writer. Crappy reviews sting, and when they are vindictive, they really sting. Let’s face it, if it’s intelligent, it’s a matter of taste; if it’s not, why bother? As an author, I don’t want an uninterested reader spending time savaging me, so why would I do the same?
Related to this is how to keep going when your writing is crap. It has been a journey for me not to criticize myself into paralysis. This is terrible; just stop. Make this perfect then you can do more. But I can’t afford to do that. What I have to do is let the junk pile up on the page. The stupid, cliched scene. The dumb character I know I’ll cut. The totally far-too-technical legal scene that I researched for three days so that the lawsuit would pass muster in Superior Court. Boring. Dumb. But it freed me to find the moment when the character facing that lawsuit is like, oh my god, what am I going to do? That moment is gold. I did the work to know this is catastrophic for the character. Then I can write real fear and dread, hopelessness and helplessness. Cut the legalese later, but the character terror stays.
This is the lesson of DTF for me. If you don’t cut that stuff, then I’m not going to finish. If you lose yourself in the details, I’m going to put your book down. If you wallow in the emotions without consequences, I’m stopping. It’s been freeing in that I don’t have to stick with bad prose or poor plot, but also frees me up to enjoy books that aren’t perfect. I know that sounds contradictory, but I just finished a book that wasn’t perfect. It had many, many great attributes: cool inciting action, a good general premise, some pretty intense, if sometimes unrealistic, action. And here’s the thing that saved it: I really wanted to know what happened in the end.
So a book needn’t be perfect. It can have flaws. The story just has to outweigh them all.
Currently reading: 
Cloudthief, Nathaniel Rich, 2026
Next in my TBR list: Cool Machine, Colson Whitehead, 2026
Love it! As Elmore Leonard said, ‘try to leave out the parts the readers tend to skip’.
Words I try to live by!
Well said. Just because a book isn’t for me doesn’t mean I need to tar it with a DNF brush. And what I find objectionable, others may enjoy. Even the long, boring, parts.
Moby Dick is not for everyone, it turns out!
What a wonderfully kind approach! I love it!
Thank you!
As a reader, not a writer, I agree that the literary experience is completely subjective. Reviews can be helpful, but in the end it all comes down to personal likes and dislikes.
There have only been 2 or 3 books that were DNF in my experience, and they were quite poorly written. I do want to read through to the end to see how everything is tied up but quickly realized that with them there was no redemption.
Some readers are comfortable with a predictable story line. They don’t want the unexpected. I don’t mind a certain amount of violence but the mutilations in Ed McBain’s Puss In Boots have haunted me for years. Actually put me off her books for years. A good setting, dialog (even if only internal), local history, humor, animals, and a WOW I didn’t see that coming at the end are all absorbed subjectively by the reader.
If you’ve got a story to tell, keep writing. We readers appreciate you and can’t wait to tell you where you went wrong:)
I agree that the DNFs are rare. But as I’m always looking to find new authors, I’ve run across books with a lot of hype that don’t deliver. Sometimes it’s my personal taste, but it’s the poor writing that will put me off every time.