‘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