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 personally think James Joyce must have been a schizophrenic or something. Not that the mentally ill can’t write well. Just that his rambling style is a symptom of disease not genius. Ulysses is a mess, and Finnegan’s Wake is almost incomprehensible from page one, and if anyone else submitted a manuscript like that it would never see the light of day. everyone is so convinced he’s one of the greats but his work is nearly indecipherable to laypeople and scholars alike. I took a class on Ulysses in school and we never finished the book, we just jumped around for a semester. I just saw an article of a book club that took 30 years to read FW. That’s about a half-a-page a week. That’s not something to be proud of, more like proof that it’s utter nonsense. (His daughter was actually diagnosed with schizophrenia and it tends to be hereditary, so it’s not a completely baseless claim.)