Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly themed post first created by The Broke and the Bookish in 2010 and is now hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl.
This week’s theme is a freebie, so I decided to feature my 10 most recent DNFs and the reasons I DNF’d them! For those who don’t know, DNF stands for Did Not Finish. I don’t often put a book down before finishing it, but I’m actually trying to do that more often if a book isn’t working for me – life is too short to read books you don’t enjoy!





- Projections by S.E. Porter – This is my most recent DNF and I only read a chapter before deciding the writing style wasn’t working for me and I really didn’t want to push through it.
- Masters of Death by Olivie Blake – Started out great, but two characters got in the same room and the vibe was ruined. Read until about halfway through.
- Witch King by Martha Wells – This was another book that started out promising, but I lost interest. Super disappointing because I love the Murderbot books.
- Engines of Chaos by R.S. Ford – Adored the first book in this series and was very excited for this, but ultimately I no longer cared about the characters or the stakes.
- Death and Croissants by Ian Moore – I just hated it. You can read my review to find out why.





- The First Binding by R.R. Virdi – I actively resent this book for the blatant ripoff of The Name of the Wind. The parallels are SO obvious and there are SO many of them!
- The Carnival of Ash by Tom Beckerlegge – This book was misrepresented and ended up being more like historical fiction than fantasy, plus there was one good character and the rest were a bunch of pompous pricks.
- The Maleficent Seven by Cameron Johnston – This book sounded like something I would love, but it really didn’t click with me. I much preferred the similarly named The Malevolent Seven.
- Crave by Tracy Wolff – Horrible, Twilight-esque teen paranormal romance. Might have been better if I hadn’t tried the audiobook, which made the awful dialogue more noticable.
- The Justice in Revenge by Ryan Van Loan – Another case of me loving the first book, but the tone changed drastically in the sequel. The characters weren’t the same ones I loved so much before!

I haven’t read any of these but a few I’m curious about. I had heard of that Name of the Wind comparison about The First Binding, it makes you wonder why publishers do stuff like that!
LikeLiked by 1 person
The First Binding was SO blatantly similar I was shocked!!
LikeLike
Yeah, I finished Death and Croissants and you didn’t miss anything—it only ever got worse. Still need to get to Engines of Chaos! I’ve been getting a lot of DNFs from Orbit lately, so I’ve kinda been putting it off 😅
LikeLiked by 1 person
I think Engines of Chaos was a me issue and not a book issue!
LikeLike
DNFing is so freeing! And had I started doing so before this year, I would probably have DNF’ed Witch King. It was so dry!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Witch King was a tremendous disappointment!! And I both love and hate DNF’ing – it’s freeing but I do feel bad about it 😂
LikeLike