Top Ten Tuesday September 5: books others DNF but I like

~ Ally Writes Things

Learn more about Top Ten Tuesday here! This week is “Ten Books I Struggled to Get Into But Ended Up Loving or Ten Books That Were A Chore To Get Through or Ten Books I’ve Most Recently Put Down (the theme is…books you had a hard time with…tweak it how ever you need)”

This is hard because if I’m not enjoying a book, I just stop reading it. So I thought I’d switch it up a bit and do books OTHERS didn’t enjoy, but I did (based on the Goodreads DNF page)

  1. the Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
  2. Red Rising by Pierce Brown
  3. Looking for Alaska by John Green
  4. the Martian by Andy Weir (apparently this has been DNF’d 201 times even though the overall rating is fairly high)
  5. the Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
  6. the Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness
  7. Nothing by Janne Teller
  8. the Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
  9. the Unbecoming of Mara Dyer by Michelle Hodkin
  10. Legend by Marie Lu

Thanks for reading!! xx

Published by Ally Writes Things

I like books and talking about my opinions.

21 thoughts on “Top Ten Tuesday September 5: books others DNF but I like”

    1. Me too, Looking for Alaska is my favourite John Green!

      And I know!!!! I guess it can be slow, but there’s so many good things that I think are worth pushing through it for!

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  2. The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer is one of my favorite books of all time! Was happy to see it made this list. But what does DNF mean? Very new to book blogging terminology haha! Lovely post.

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  4. I haven’t read “The Martian,” but I suspect that a lot of people started to read it based on loving the movie, and then couldn’t adjust from screen to book. That seems to happen a lot with book adaptations.

    I’m with you on not finishing a book your don’t enjoy! Life is too short to force yourself to read a book. (Well, your English teachers may have other ideas, though.)

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    1. I think so too! I think the book was less actiony than they were expecting after the movie.

      And I never understood struggling through a book you’re not enjoying! Although my teachers did force me to anyway

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      1. Well, teachers usually have a reason for making you finish books. And I do understand that – though I appreciated it when one of my high school English teachers let the class come up with an alternate way to study “Great Expectations” (we all hated that book). We had a small class size that year, and our teacher let us (at our request) each read individual chapters and then do mini book reports to the rest of the class. It was a win-win! That way, we each had to read less of the book (win for us) and yet we probably got more out of it by having to give the reports to the rest of the class (win for her).

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      2. That’s so awesome! One of my teachers had specific chapters we could skip for our novel study in Grade 12, but I went back and read them after and they weren’t even related to the book (it was Into the Wild and the chapters were just somewhat related anecdotes) so it wasn’t even that useful skipping them

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      3. I always love it when teachers do things like this that show they are working with the class rather than making the class conform! It fosters a much better learning environment, but sadly we don’t seem to give teachers the leeway to do the cool things as often as we should.

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      4. I agree! One of my friends is a teacher, and at her school instead of assigning specific books, they have like a book club for each grade and each student has to read five books or something, which I thought was such a great idea because then they get to read whichever books from the list sound most interesting to them!

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  5. This is interesting. I’ve read a few of these. I think the one that sticks out the most to me is “The Martian.” That was such a love/hate book for me. I REALLY liked the story and Mark Watney himself. I thought about the story all the time when I wasn’t reading it. But at the same time, I didn’t love all the science-y stuff in the book. Which made me feel dumb. Which made me annoyed with the book and I kept not wanting to finish it. But at the same time, I really loved it. So I understand the back and forth with this one for sure!

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    1. Thank you! I totally see where you’re coming from with the Martian! When I was reading it, my major was in science so I had a very (very) loose grasp on what he was talking about, but it was still so sciencey and I feel like that took away from it for a lot of people

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    1. I liked the Lovely Bones too!

      I know a lot of people who dislike John Green. I really only like Looking for Alaska, his other ones haven’t really done anything for me

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