[gmw]

I've rarely dropped a book due to the content ... well, not in the way that usually implies. I have dropped some books in recent years after discovering that my taste for military SF and fantasy appears to have evaporated. I should have DNFed Clive Cussler's The Mediterranean Caper due to content early in the book - actually the title should have been enough. The later books were very sexist, but that first is appalling. It has since been renamed Mayday, presumably to try and avoid the bad press, you have been warned.

Sometimes I DNF because I don't like the prose. I've tried a few books by Cassandra Clare for example, and while the stories seemed good enough I was constantly on edge waiting for the next sentence that was going to throw me. (This is reverse of books I would read and enjoy even just for the author's voice.)

Some of my DNFs are the result of poor decision making. Sometimes I don't bother to read the first few pages before purchase, and then I open the book and cringe at clumsy first-person prose and think: Oops! I think this is partly fed by the whole ebook thing: it's so easy, and often cheap, to pick up books that I take less care with my choices than when it used to be an expedition to the shops and a much more significant investment for each book.

Some DNFs are books that I really did expect to enjoy, or at least find readable, only to find my eyelids drooping. Such books can be hard to pin down as to why they are not working - the prose, the story, the lack of connection, the voice, all of the above - but when find myself choosing to work rather than pick up my ereader I know it's time to go.

But mostly I DNF because I'm bored. I know things are going badly when I find myself picking holes in the plot, in the characters, in the proof-reading - all things I can be quite forgiving of if I'm enjoying myself.