thistlechaser | Another day, another pile of DNF books... (Reply)

I'm still working from my oldest books forward, which is why I have so many DNFs. Many years ago, I gave self-published books as little scrutiny as I do traditionally-published books, and so I ended up with so many bad books. So many bad books...

40) Sentari: Ice by Trevor Booth. The writing in this one was just so awful, I didn't even get far enough to know what the plot was about. Things like "The death hound stared with death in his eyes and chased them on death-filled paws", the same basic description used multiple times in a sentence.

41) Secret of the Wolves by Dorothy Hearst. Supposedly told from the POV of a wolf, it supposedly told the story of how wolves became domesticated. If that had been the actual plot, I would have loved it, but instead it was this odd mythical thing about how "Ancients" (gods? aliens?) told the wolves to be the keeper of men otherwise the Ancients would destroy the world. Checking Goodreads, I discovered this book does one of the worst things ever: It has no ending, it just gets cut off and continues in the next book.

42) Cold Between Stars by Belinda Crawford. Told from the POV of a trans boy on a spaceship, he wakes up out of stasis to find everyone else dead. As interesting as that sounds, the story didn't hook me at all. Checking Goodreads, apparently it does the same thing as Secret of the Wolves: Just stops mid-story and picks up in the next book, no ending at all. Plus the author did the "glossary of words you'll find in this book" at the beginning, which always annoys me -- if you must make up words, show the reader what they mean in your text.

43) Nri Kryne (Monsters and Demons) by Mara Duryea. The dialogue and writing in this one just didn't work for me, too many needlessly made up words (but at least no glossary!).

44) Sands by Kevin L. Nielsen. The plot of this one seemed interesting enough: Desert tribe has to constantly move to avoid sand-monsters. But the main character was just so unreasonable and did such stupid things, I lost interest really quickly. Plus her name was Lhaurel, which unreasonably annoyed me (Laurel + h?). I kept trying to pronounce it la-ha-urel.