‘Stop Booking Me, Thank You Very Much’: On DNFing Books

Books? Hooked. All booked up, in fact –

and fiction, though sometimes life’s not without

the occasional bookish friction,

more precisely called the DNFriction,

whose short, sharp existence, read and unread,

has the surreal smell and sound

of the soundest non-fiction.

Neat words? Not quite, as you’ll soon discover in my probably-quite-judgy-eyed, not-quite-

confident conclusions – all unfinished, inconclusive and off course, of course.

 

The first book I’ve ever unfriended

from my precious reading time zone

is a bit of a presumptuous character, for it contains this character who keeps

assuming I know everything, when I most certainly do not.

You know, you know, you know!

In every page she keeps screaming, or rather pretends to shout

at other characters, when you and I know she’s yelling at me, me, me,

defensively urging me to keep reading that plotless book she’s in, one that needs

urgent attention, as much as it can get – and maybe more as I snore.

 

Another unbooked book, equally demanding,

without being literary, literally

forces me, with its forceful character, to continue reading, just because

the character says so by pretending, like our previous old book friend,

to say ‘because I say so’ to his young son,

at every known opportunity,

stifling the poor boy’s growth – and mine,

which is very, very

sunny of the book indeed.

 

And oh, to psychologists, if you happen to find

yourself analysing your reactions when reading my grown-groan … groans,

I have a question about a questionable psychologist character in another

book I’ve cancel-cultured from my reading slot:

do most of you sound like someone’s

judgemental and gossipy neighbour in best-selling psychological thrillers?

This might be a rhetorical question as opposed to a thrilling one

because I doubt it,

seeing that novel, with its totally toxic protagonist therapist, as poorly lit by poor research, unliteratured, insufficiently novel, (ab)normal.