You wanted to read the book, you were excited to crack it open, you came into it with good faith and anticipation… but you ended up dnf-ing it. Which book and why?
Mine was The Maid by Nita Prose. It was for my book club and looked like a fun murder mystery. Instead I got instant manic-pixie-dream-neurodivergent-girl vibes, and I noped out before the crime scene was even found.
I haven’t quite DNF’d it as in I’ll never pick it up, but I’m sorry, I’ve tried 5 separate times to read through the Lord of the Rings, and I just can’t make it past chapter 2. It got so bad that I vowed to just a couple pages a day until I got to the interesting stuff. Part of me thinks to just outright skip the first entire section since I already know what happens for the most part.
His style takes some getting used to, and it does drag in the beginning.
In my opinion, it picks up at about Chapter 10 (Strider). If you’re going to skip the first section, I’d recommend starting there.
Once you get into them, they’re some of the most immersive books I’ve ever read. Tolkien’s style is so richly descriptive that I felt like I was there a lot of the time. I distinctly remember when the Fellowship is standing around at the base of Orthanc in Isengard and talking about what to do about Saruman, and each person weighs in. At some point, the first person to speak talks again, and I immediately felt outraged that they’d skipped me. :)
Oh absolutely. My brother got a graphic novel of The Hobbit that I loved so I tried to give the book a go and just could not do it. I love trees but I don’t need a 3 page description of one. I found that I was skipping over large sections of the text avoiding the painfully detailed bits that were entirely unnecessary and decided it just wasn’t for me.