2022 DNF books: So many books...

Seven DNF books in no special order:

23: SNAFU: Future Warfare by assorted authors. I picked this one up because one of the episodes of Love, Death, and Robots was based on a story in this book. Turns out the show changed enough things to make the story a lot more palatable.

The story I was interested in was about human farmers terraforming another planet when aliens suddenly attacked. That much held true between the episode and the story, but turns out the episode changed genders enough that it was no longer manly men fighting the aliens while all the women just stay in the background and support them. Plus the editing was really, really bad, too. I didn't even finish the one story I had been interested in, let alone the other five in the book.

24: Now We Are Ten by assorted authors. This had been the oldest book on my Kindle. Sometimes I just go way to the back and pick one of the oldest ones, otherwise I'll never get to them.

Turns out some scifi convention had a bad first year, so they published a book to pay off their debts. The "publisher" of that book (one guy) said "Hey, this isn't so hard!" and kept on publishing more. That "publishing company" turned ten at the time this book was published (2016), so he put out this anthology.

The stories in it were so odd. They seemed good... but all had the worst endings. Endings so bad they ruined the rest of the story. I never encountered something like it before. I only read a few of the 17 stories in it before giving up out of frustration.

25: The Quest for the Thunder Stone by Craig Halloran. Once I deleted Now We Are Ten, this one became the new oldest book on my Kindle, so I tried it next.

The whole "book", which was somehow "Sword and Sorcery Epic Fantasy Sample Fantasy Bundle Pack - 4 Books in 1 Book 2", would have taken about 20 minutes to read. Even that short, I had only gotten 10% through it. The writing was just that bad. I was more curious about "4 Books in 1 Book 2" than any part of the plot. How many books was it supposed to be? Why make a sample of "4 Books in 1 Book 2"? We'll never know.

26: A Song in the Rain by Lydia Deyes. While I can't find a review I wrote of this one, I had tried to read it before (and DNFed it then) for sure. As soon as I recognized it, I stopped reading it. It was supposed to be a talking animal story, but it was just basically people in animal shapes, and not well written at all.

27: A Riddle in Ruby by Kent Davis. I almost thought I'd finish this one. It started out interesting: Set in a fantasy world, a young girl was living on a ship and being raised as a thief/pirate. About 15 minutes into the story, she seemed to de-age about ten years and became a moody, snotty, little brat. Just a horrible little kid who I had no interest in reading about.

The book was meant for ages 8-12, so the kid character would probably work a lot better for young readers. Big thumbs down from adult reader me though.

28: The Returning by Christine Hinwood. Based on reviews on Goodreads, apparently you needed to take your time with this book. Read one page, then take the rest of the day to think about it. To me, that would have made it even more boring. Supposedly this was a book about the results of war, the impact war has on people. But in the part I read, nothing happened, and it was so slow I just lost all interest.

29: Mammoth Boy by John Hart. I wanted to like this one so much, it should have been a good match for me. It was set back in the time when both Cro-Magnon man and Neanderthals both walked the Earth at the same time. "Tribes" were loose things, the dominant males and their women stuck together, but any boys likely wandered off on their own.

The main character, a Cro-Magnon boy, wandered off and met a Neanderthal man. The two became friends.

The story was interesting enough, and clearly the author was an expert on the subject, but the issue was that the (British) author was using so much archaic British language. I feel like I have a good vocabulary, but in one single sentence I had to look up four words (the four words were different parts of a river, like "mouth" and such). It was just so hard to get into the story when I was having to stop so often and look a word up.

This is a very rare case where I'm going to leave the book on my Kindle and give it another try after finishing my current book. I'd like to read more of the story, it's just so frustrating to get through the language to reach it.