Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.

This weeks list is top ten books I did not finish. It isn’t often that I DNF a book. I’m not sure what I think will happen if I abandon a book but I tend to struggle on. The ones on this list really annoyed me.

1. Whatever Love Means – David Baddiel – Tedious exploration of masculinity and sex which is neither exciting or clever.
2. Lorna Doone – R. D. Blackmore – I had seen an adaptation of this and really enjoyed it but the novel was slow and lacking in tension.
3. The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith – Peter Carey – This was a very strange book. The style was hard to read, the events made no sense and I didn’t care for the characters.
4. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky – I really wanted to enjoy this but I didn’t really get that far. The protagonist was annoying and the narrative was stodgy.
5. The Virgin’s Lover – Philippa Gregory – This was about Elizabeth I and Robert Dudley and reads a bit like Carry on Tudors. Ridiculously bawdy.
6. The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne. The prose style was unreadable.
7. On the Road – Jack Kerouac – Sexist nonsense. Perhaps he should have taken longer than three weeks to complete the first draft.
8. Atonement – Ian McEwan – I finished this but I genuinely wished I hadn’t bothered. I won’t spoil it but to me it felt like McEwan had said ‘and then they woke up’ at the end. It felt lazy and annoying.
9. The Time Traveller’s Wife. – Audrey Niffenegger I did in fact finish this but only because the thing that annoyed me was right at the end. To be fair, I was already a little irritated but when I realised Clare waited to see Henry one more time, it tipped me over the edge. I know it’s supposed to be romantic but if I’d realised that was the end, I’d definitely have stopped earlier.
10. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society – Mary Ann Schaffer – Another time the film was a lot better than the book. Very disappointing.