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Not finishing book is uncommon for me but not super rare. It's usually the result of me trying to get into a new genre based on having enjoyed some book considering adjacent to said genre. Most of the time this works out but sometimes that experiment fails and most of my DNF list consists of those failures.
To give a few examples...
Lost in Cat Brain Land by Cameron Pierce.
I do really like very weird books, some of the books among my all time favorites, like The Troika or The Age of Wire and String are very weird indeed, so I thought the genre of Bizarro Fiction might be to my taste.
But it turns ou some stuff is just a little too weird. Both this short story collection as well as some other novella by the same publisher was a bunch of strung together non-sequiturs with some graphic violence for the sake of shock factor. Maybe I would have gotten through if at least the characters acted reasonably.
Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
A very different book from the previous one but abandoned for the same kind of reason.
Novels of ideas are really neat and I usually don't even mind books that become essayistic but this one was just completely annoying. I'm sure it's all very well intentioned and absolutely, people are selfish and wasteful but not a single point the book made about any issue felt innovative or well thought out compared to the millions of other books that claim to solve the problems of humanity itself. I stopped around the halfway mark I think.
Egil's Saga by Snorri Sturluson
If someone likes historical fiction and ancient cultures, what could be better than actually reading a proper historical text from an ancient culture?
This particular text was not better, it read like a hundreds of pages long slightly exaggerated Wikipedia biography section of random Vikings and there's just nothing to really care about. So I dropped that one pretty early on.
Coin Locker Babies by Ryu Murakami.
Definitely the book I dropped the fastest. I did hear that most people can't get past the first one or two sentences and usually such claims are hyperbolic but in that case I guess I am "most people". I tried starting it three times already, because I really like weird dystopias and every time I immediately change my mind.
Oxford Dictionary of English 3rd Edition
I was bored. It seemed like a useful project especially since English isn't my native language and the odd term or phrase still catches me off-guard.
So I thought I'd just read the dictionary A to Z. I'd ignore any word I already knew, note the ones I didn't for future reference. Sure it sounds kind of dumb but what if it works? Unfortunately I did not get past A.
Out of all books listed this has the best chance of me trying to tackle it again.
There's a bunch of other DNF books but most follow that same pattern. It's not really a surprise when it happens, in fact I could see at least half of them coming before starting but it's still a risk worth taking. I don't want to get stuck in a niche and stagnate there, I hate the thought that I might be missing out on something that I do not yet know I like.
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