‘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.
Love this! Reminds me of the time when...When I got home and horribly regretted buying that doctor/author's self-published book with the test tubes on the cover, instead of just saying thank you and putting it back, just because I told him I worked in a lab so he told me I would love his book while his three-year-old handed out free cupcakes and effectively made sales at his book table.
ReplyDeleteOh dear! That was some experience indeed 😂 I have read two or three excellent self-published books before, but I can relate to your experience. I used to receive review requests from self-published authors and feel cheated when their pitch and book content were completely different 😂 That has made me a bit weary of accepting new review requests... ;)
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