There’s a specific kind of guilt that comes with staring at a half-read book on your Kindle or nightstand for three months. You keep bringing your Kindle or book with you from room to room, as if a simple change of location will magically make you want to finish it.
Spoiler alert: it won’t.
welcome to my DNF and Unshelved graveyard!
I want to make one thing completely clear: this is not a hate list. Not every book featured here is objectively “bad.” Some of them simply caught me at the wrong time; some were tragic victims of my short attention span; some are just painfully boring or outright not for me. Life is entirely too short to force yourself through a 400 page book you dread picking up.
So, here lies the graveyard of unfinished reads, abandoned stories, and books currently collecting dust on my virtual bookshelf while I pretend they still have a chance—along with those I have completely unshelved for reasons I shall mention below.
what counts as a DNF?
For those unfamiliar with the acronym, DNF = Did Not Finish. While the term is pretty self-explanatory in the reading community, my personal rules for what qualifies are a bit more chaotic than the standard standard.
Here are my official graveyard criteria
- If I stop reading for more than 3 months, it has spiritually been DNF’d unless I explicitly state otherwise.
- Spice that makes me visibly cringe or is written before I hit 50% is an immediate “see you later.”
- If the vibes are off, there’s no way to come back from it.
- If it’s a snooze fest at any point, it rarely redeems itself.
Sometimes I quietly quit a book and pretend like I’m eventually coming back because it’s “not that bad.” I will say there are definitely books I stop reading for the sake of my own mental health, or because a book club has paused our meetings, or maybe I’m just too freaking busy. Those are safely exempt from my personal DNF board… though they’re not always safe forever.
current residents of the graveyard
failed romances
- Girls Who Lie Together by Jess Russo: This was an initial DNF before I made the chaotic decision that I had to know how it ended. Did I regret that choice? 100%. It definitely morphed into more of a hate-read. Described as a Mean Girls x Grease mashup, I was incredibly excited about the LGBTQIA+ main characters, but the outcome was just… not great. Definitely could’ve been a “me” problem rather than the book, but wowzers. I hated it.
- Falling by Janisha Boswell: I was heavy into sports romances for a split second and I had seen this one floating around. I’m sure the author is a very sweet person, but the book was a hard read. There was a lot of talk and not a lot of actual movement. I feel like it fell victim to poor editing because it was way too long with a few glaring plot holes that made it hard to complete.
- Kills Me by Rose Harper: This one was definitely me and not the author! I was brand new to receiving Advanced Reader Copies (ARC) and for some reason, I thought I’d suddenly enjoy a monster romance… Yeah, no.
lost in the series
- Wildlife by Hannah Grace (Maple Hills, Book 2): Honestly, I wasn’t surprised when I DNF’d Wildfire. I was already struggling to read Grace’s other books, but I felt weird leaving the series as a whole. Unfortunately, attempting to listen to it via audiobook led to a swift, aggressive DNF. I don’t know about you, but I definitely do not enjoy smut a mere 10% into a book while it’s being blasted through my car speakers.
- Spiral by Bal Khabra (Off the Ice, Book 2): This one hurt to DNF! I absolutely loved Collide and felt ecstatic to read the second book—so much so that I was trying extremely hard to request it as an ARC. Unfortunately, Spiral did not live up to the massive hype in my head. I think it made it clear that Khabra and I were going to be (metaphorically) breaking up.
format betrayal
- Anna O by Matthew Blake: Anna O was rough. The combination of the narration style and the pacing of the story led to me being completely bored and unwilling to move forward. I had bought it so long ago on Audible that I don’t even remember purchasing it, so at least it’s a faded memory.
emotional damage
- A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara: Confession time… this isn’t technically a DNF because I didn’t even start reading it. I actually banished it to my unshelved shelf, which I broke down recently during The Anti-TBR Tag. I don’t know about you, but trauma porn is not my idea of a relaxing Friday evening. Nonetheless, it stayed on my TBR for a long time until I read a few other creators’ thoughts on the book, which helped solidify my decision to remove it entirely.
hype vs reality
- A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas: It’s so, so incredibly popular, but man, I cannot bring myself to actually finish it! This is definitely a moment of a book not living up to the massive internet height. I just don’t find a book with mostly smut and a tiny smidge of plot interesting… like, at all.
final thoughts
DNF’ing a book can occasionally feel like a failure, but it really is all about curating your personal joy. If you want to dive deeper into how I protect my reading peace, check out my thoughts on when to DNF a book
The same rule applies to removing books from your TBR. Not every book is meant for every reader, and not every reading season is the right one for every story. There are quite a few books that I’ll gladly revisit later. There are some (the ones listed above) that I absolutely will not. Some will just live forever in the “almost finished” void. And honestly, that’s the beauty of reading.
let’s chat!
What is your personal “dealbreaker” that causes an immediate DNF?
Leave a Reply