The Art of DNF
Well, I've DNF'd (Did Not Finish) 3 books now, all in a row. I'd so hoped to not do that this year because I want to get better at finishing things. But sometimes, sometimes you have to let go because time is a precious commodity and worth too much to spend frivolously on things that aren't worth it.
I already posted about The Silver Kiss, but the other two books I did not finish are an anthology of "science fiction" short stories from 2017, and a short novel translated from one of the Scandinavian languages that is essentially prose poetry/epistolary.
The upside of this is, I can get rid of the books, and thus don't have to pack them for when I move (which I am doing regardless of whether I'm going to Kansas or not in August.) In the meanwhile, I think moving forward I'm going to do a DNF record at the end of the month, rather than a post for each individual one.
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection edited by Gardner Dozois.
I only made it through 1 full story and most of a second story before realizing 1) I don't really enjoy reading short story collections like this, and 2) the two stories were not at all what I wanted when I read scifi (I have a whole post about that in drafts right now). And with an anthology or collection, the first few stories are the ones that set the tone, and if I don't like the first few, I probably won't like a majority of the remainder. So, not worth it to continue.
Along with this, I had a bunch of similar collections and decided it wasn't worth it to keep them. So by DNFing this one book, I was able to get rid of four rather large books.
The Employees by Olga Ravn
I originally bought this book because it was short, and I wanted to read more novellas. Plus, I thought it had an interesting premise; employees on a space ship become unnaturally attached to some alien artifacts they bring onto the ship. The problem I had was the story is so thin as to be diaphanous, barely present at all in the short memos that make up the prose. It was boring, even if the prose was nice. It had no characters to really latch onto to follow through the non-existent narrative. No setting to picture and immerse myself in. I got almost half way through and decided that I just didn't care. It was taking more mental energy to try to draw story out of nothing, and when I read I don't really want to have to spend that much energy. So, out it goes.