Friends of Nancy P.

There are just those times when the book you're reading isn't doing it for you. But some of us have trouble putting it down and moving on.

For those times, Nancy Pearl suggested her Rule of 50:

If you’re fifty years of age or younger, give a book fifty pages before you decide to commit to reading it or give it up. If you’re over fifty, which is when time gets even shorter, subtract your age from 100—the result is the number of pages you should read before making your decision to stay with it or quit. Since that number gets smaller and smaller as we get older and older, our big reward is that when we turn 100, we can judge a book by its cover!

You don't have to agree with the specifics, but don't be afraid to set that book aside and move on to something better.

And then talk about it here!

This is our space to chat about the book failures in our lives. Tell us why you didn't like the book everyone else seems to love. Tell us why you didn't finish the novel that looked so promising at first. Tell us why you couldn't stand the writing. Or the plot. Or the characters.

And get some (metaphorical) tea and sympathy if that's what you need.

Fire away!

I gave up on 34 books in 2025. I hope not to exceed that in 2026 if I can.

OMG! I’m so glad to still see this thread still going! I’m going to toot my own horn and say that I started the Friends of Nancy P. midway through 2014! I thought it had died years ago!

Thank you Jim for making sure that Nancy P. Lives on!

>3 scvlad: Glad to do it - you had a great idea!

I totally forgot about the Pearl rule, although I tend to give a book 1-2 chapters before I abandon it. I am about to abandon my reread of Out of Africa. I have met not only my 2 chapter requirement but have exceeded the Pearl rule as well. I loved the book for the first read and loved the movie. In the intervening years, I’ve been to Africa so that may be why I’m fixing it rather dry.

>5 LoisB: Ditch that book! (Never read it myself; don’t even think I saw the movie.)

I'm abandoning The red knight by Miles Cameron, having read more of it than the Pearl Rule requires, hoping the objectionable bits were part of the set up, and would disappear once the setting was fully introduced. (It's a Big Book, weighing in at 665 pages, so I could imagine 114 pages being basically set up.)

This book is a fantasy novel, with too much gratuitous evil/sadism to provide an escapist fix, and so many characters appearing for short periods that I'm still not sure whether I've identified the red knight referred to in the title. Maybe it's the recurring mercenary captain, or maybe it's someone else entirely.

YMMV, which is why I'm explaining what I disliked.

>6 scvlad: I’m going to do that! Thanks for the encouragement.

I didn't finish 7 books in January, and I'm up to 5 so far in February. Four of those are from the Bad Boy Inc and spinoff Killer Mom series by Eva Langlais. I enjoyed the first of each series and thought them amusing enough, but the racism of the fiery little sexy Latina woman in both series was overdone, along with the refusal to communicate leading characters to race headlong into danger. The dialogue and action weren't entertaining enough to compensate for the shallow characters and stereotypes. Meh. Says someone who ingests a lot of junk food reading material.

The fifth DNF is Beard with Me by Penny Reid. I really enjoyed most of the other Winston Brothers rom-coms, and associated Knitting in they City except for the other one featuring Billy and Claire (Beard Necessities). I just can't with the star-crossed lovers who pine over the years to the annoyance and frustration of everyone around them. So I just couldn't get into the origin story of their teenage romance and sundering.

I gave up on two in January (and I rarely go over two or three DNFs in a year).

I gave up on the Robert Fagels translation of Homer's Odyssey after about one page. See my recent position my thread about it, but it was not doing it for me. Back to Robert Fitzgerald who is my preferred translator.

>9 justchris: It sounds like you have good parameters in place in terms of what to read and what to reject. Not finishing 7 books in a month is, in my view, evidence of smart reading.

I very rarely call a book a DNF. I do, however, put a fair number back on the shelf with the bookmark where I stopped and promise book and self that I will try again another time. Sometimes I do, and others I haven't gotten back to yet after years and years and years.

Gave up on Bill Bryson's LIFE AND TIMES OF THE THUNDERBOLT KID after the kid author
tried to poison another kid by force feeding 4 pounds of what he thought were poisonous berries.

Also notable was gratuitous use of n-word.

I have a whole shelf on Goodreads called Sorry-not-sorry (that i hope has become a tag here with the Import) dedicated to books that are supposed to be great, but I cannot stomach. And I need the world to know it. I also have an Abandoned collection as distinct from Unfinished, where the latter are books that just escaped my firm grasp while i was reading them - usually a rabid Librarian hatcheting my front door with a Cease-and-Desist in their hands; while Abandoned books are made such with gusto, and the occasional parabolic trajectory through the living room and out of the window.

I LOVE to hate bad books. ESPECIALLY when they are popular. I am not talking The Da Vinci Code, roasting a novel like that is rookie stuff.

I am talking Virginia Woolf. I have a special disgust for Mrs. Dalloway and her inconsequential First-World internal drama.

I am talking E.M. Forster. Howard's End and that mellow "Just Connect". Oh really loveen, just connect with your money, and everything will be just fine. Oh look, the peasants don't see the easiness in the technique. How uncouth of them to be too broke to appreciate the good things in life, by MY perspective.

I am talking D. H. lawrence. Ok we understand you are horny, can we go on with our day now?

Can you see a thread here by the way...

Or Wuthering Heights. I swear if a member of my family pulled half of the shenanigans that lady and her friend-with-benefit pulled AND with a pout on all the time, I don't know what it would be of them. The notions on those two.

I could go on.

Unfortunately, you cannot only and ever hate on the majestic classics. Every now and then one has to content themselves with lesser targets.

I recently yeeted* Christopher Paolini's To Sleep In A Sea Of Stars after n pages. A good amount of pages actually. the mistake of my ways had a two-fold source. On one side, I had not realised this was the Eragon guy, or the book would have never traversed Ireland to come to Galway City Library. The second was that I am approaching the end of The Culture series by Iain M. Banks with The Hydrogen Sonata and I will be soon left an orphan, also because the man had the horrible idea of dying suddenly and way too young (a polite age would have been after me, and keeping on the good writing till my last day, but the Scottish have no manners and so they haven't). Pre-entively bereaved, I went on the hunt after ancillary pleasures.

And oh boy, was I punished for my hubris.

Look, the idea behind the book is not even that bad.

But.

Not only the man Paolini writes meh.
Not only a person living hundreds of year in the future and on an out-world colony greets her family with "hi sis" (who says that??).

The man Paolini ripped off the whole idea of the quirky names and personalities of the Starship Minds from Iain M. Banks. From the Culture novels. Completely missing the humour and the point, of course. And not acknowledging Banks even once.

Oh my tale of woe, these four walls still resent the yeeting of the (hefty) volume. ALL four walls. Repeatedly. Quasi-ritually.

I want to meet the man. Him, me, and a meat grinder. A SMALL one.

So, I am back to finishing the audiobook of the Hydrogen Sonata, I console myself with a deliciously compact hardcover edition of The Forsyte saga with a delightful cover, and I fill the hole in the walls waiting for the next sorry-not-sorry tale of woe.

*Delicious neologism of the gaming youth, meaning: to eject forcefully at a certain distance

EDIT: DISCLAIMER. The rabid librarian image is a pure figment of my imagination, born of the need for colour in my vignette. All Galway County Librarian without one single exception are the most patient sweethearts, constantly renewing with a smile my appallingly late loans, and never complaining nor yeeting ME from the Library membership.

>14 m.belljackson: I find Bryson a snore fest. My father, for some mysterious reason, adores him. It must be a thing of men his generation - worldwide, because we are pure-bred Italians, if such a thing even exists out of oxymorons.

>12 scvlad: I agree in the highest degree. High reading standards may save humanity. Also, at a personal level, life is too short for books that are not up to par. Or even books that seem to think we are not up to par with them (ahem cough cough anything that Alessandro Baricco wrote cough cough).

Oh dear, do I adore this thread.

>15 Elanna76: I haven't anything good to say about Paolini, but then I had this to say about Banks:
If you like huge pointless body counts, gruesome dismemberment and think there is a point to saving a life by risking all the lives that matter, sure sink more hours than you can really spare in 644 pages of pleated plot that hides the near complete lack of ability to write more than isolated scenes.

>15 Elanna76:. You are very welcome here! Post long and post often! I look forward to reading your views.

But I hate to say that I’ve read some Baricco that I’ve quite liked. (Of course I was reading it in Italian and I’m not THAT fluent so I may have missed some nuance …)

>19 quondame: I see your point about the Culture novels. They do be loose and somewhat bloated, but I so cherish the world-building and the reflections - not to talk about the style and the Ship Minds with their awesome names - that I would go on reading forever.
I found most of the violence hard to take but quite functional to the plots, especially the Hells in Surface Detail and the final killings in Look to Windward - a post-scarcity culture does not mean that horrors don't keep being perpetrated somewhere, and where is the limit between preventing worse horrors and committing some of them? Maybe what I like of Banks is the fact that he does not have a clear-cut position and that he doesn't believe in actions of single persons having any bearing on the developments in the bigger picture...
Enough praise, this is a thread for roasting books!

>20 scvlad: Baricco writes very well, I just could never understand about what!

>21 Elanna76: As I am currently sloggiing through a _reread_ of a long book because I’m hooked on the world-building, even though little time is spent on my besties, I have to support you in sticking with what you enjoy.

>23 quondame: sometimes the world-building is so good that all the rest fades away... what's your reread?

>24 Elanna76: The Black Wolves, but I just loaded it on top of Crossroads, only the first one of which is at my recommend rating. I just like The Hundreds and have to keep watching them as those who should be caring for the region abuse it and the people who live in The Hundreds.

Gave up right away on A Fortunate Life since it led off with hideous possum torture and killings.

>22 Elanna76: LOL!

I neglected to post this here in March:

Today, I finished Myra Breckinridge. I HATED this book. I would have Pearl-ruled it, but because it was a shared read, I felt it would be better-served if I stayed with it and rated it only 1*. I didn’t like the writing style - run-on sentences and multi-page paragraphs. I didn’t like the author’s pretentious attitude that most women want to be raped as part of their sexual experience. And, I could not find a character that I liked! The only saving grace was that it did have a happy ending. I do not recommend reading this book.

>15 Elanna76: I love your phrasing, particularly:

also have an Abandoned collection as distinct from Unfinished, where the latter are books that just escaped my firm grasp while i was reading them - usually a rabid Librarian hatcheting my front door with a Cease-and-Desist in their hands; while Abandoned books are made such with gusto, and the occasional parabolic trajectory through the living room and out of the window.

I may have to find your thread and subscribe to it, even though I can't keep up with the threads I already have.

>29 ArlieS: you are very kind! I would love to hear your opinions on my reviews. I feel your pain about all the great threads I can't keep up with... but if you stumble upon my ramblings you are always very welcome to comment. I like myself a nice discussion!

>27 scvlad: I swear! Baricco gives me sea-sickness by lack of a centre of gravity, pretty much like Murakami, but with more style ;D

>26 m.belljackson: possum... torture? Who the heck does that 😳

>34 Elanna76: Australians and now Americans.

Just read that Possums are now being tracked for bait to catch pythons.