Hello!

I am 28 years old – I got back into reading in about 2019 when I’d have been about 23 and it has taken until March 2025 for me to DNF a book.

I can’t speak for my childhood (though if Storygraph has existed when I was a teenager I’d have been all over it) but I don’t think I’ve ever DNFed a book – I’ve always had a ‘completionist’ personality type and I’ve always worried about missing out; what if the book gets good after I stop reading? But this year I’ve had my own character development and I’ve risen above that fear in favour of valuing my time.

The book in question was Prince of Thorns by Mark Lawrence – I was co-reading with the audiobook (thank you Bookbeat ❤️) and I was very bored from the off. The main character is a 14-year-old boy who was leading a band of misfits (who respected a literal child who kept calling himself a man as their leader?), it took until the 50% mark for a real plot to actually emerge and I’d told myself that if I wasn’t enjoying it by 50%, I was allowing myself to DNF it. So when one of the last scenes before the 50% mark is aforementioned 14-year-old boy taking up the advances of a woman selling her services and he’s trying to read a book balanced on her behind whilst participating in her services and it wasn’t explicit, but it was definitely wasn’t something I ever needed to read.

Plus, I know that this book is at least part of a trilogy so that slow-pacing that meant the real juice of the plot that didn’t emerge until 50% also made me think that this suicide mission that the 14-year-old child is being sent on probably wouldn’t have been resolved in the first book and I would probably have to commit to reading the whole series so I was very glad to nip it in the bud before I got reluctantly hooked and ended up hate-reading the rest of the series.

I know people choose different markers as the minimum point to read before they DNF whether it’s 50 pages, 100 pages, 20% or if the vibes are off from page 1, but for me I choose 50% because at that point I’d put in half the time I would have put into reading the whole book, so if I’m not prepared to put that time in again then DNFing it makes sense in my brain. Anything after 50%, I know I’d spend less time finishing it than I’d already spent on the book so I might as well finish it, but 50% is a good marker for me. Though this may be up for negotiations in future as I become more practised in DNFing books.

Whilst I’m incredibly proud of myself for actually deciding not to continue reading, there’s still a part of me that is wondering what happens in the second half, but considering how seriously I feel fomo, the fact that I cared less about enduring the second half than finding out what happened is either a reflection of my own personal growth or how dull that story was, but I don’t want to slam this book too much so I’ll say it’s my own development!

Even with that said, I don’t think the book was that bad – I don’t think it was badly written, I think it would have been quite an engaging YA book that felt like it was written in quite a classic fantasy style (it gave me Arthurian Legend, classic historic fantasy vibes), it just wasn’t my vibe at all. It’s not listed as a YA book on Storygraph and I had to click on ‘See more’ to have it listed on Goodreads, but even then it felt like a very young YA – I think the only readers who would accept that a 14-year-old could lead a band of misfits and just accept it are other 14 year olds. It has pretty mixed reviews on Storygraph – it’s definitely considered more gory/horror than the genres would suggest, some people had similar opinions to me, some enjoyed and compared it to Joe Abercrombie, most just put their star rating and no further opinion. I wouldn’t not recommend it to the right person, but I am not, in fact, the right person.

And that’s my first experience of DNFing a book! Now that I’ve done it once I definitely feel like I have the confidence to do it again. It’s also given me the confidence to accept the books I don’t enjoy and reminded me that I don’t have to like them just because they’re popular online – I’m so ready to get rid of The Atlas series by Olivie Blake, because I tried to blame my mental health for not being obsessed with this series but I’ve now accepted that it’s just not my kind of writing style at all and that’s fine! My husband, however, is still 50:50 on whether he’s actually going to read The Atlas Complex, so I’m not adding them to my Vinted as of yet but they’re on their way there.

Thank you for reading,

Sophie xx