DNF Roundup – January Through June

Something I am trying (and largely failing) to get better at is dropping books that I’m not enjoying. I feel a compulsion to keep reading, even when I’m not enjoying the experience or getting anything out of the book. Here are a collection of mini-reviews for books I didn’t finish this year. I’ll flag how far I made it in each book and the reasons I put it down, as well as try to acknowledge the things it did well.

I’m hoping to have more of these, not because I like trashing books, but because I want to get better at using my reading time for books I love, instead of fighting against something that isn’t working. Will it happen? Probably not, but who knows.

Disco Witches of Fire Island, by Blair Fell

This book was one of my most anticipated of the year. The title is simply phenomenal, and I loved how unabashedly queer it was. Unfortunately, I struggled with almost everything about this book that wasn’t the title, and dropped it around page 50. The primary culprit was the prose. Fell explained the obvious, ignoring all semblances of subtlety. The characters felt like badly designed puppets, imitating humans but clearly unable to succeed.

It also struggled (in the bits I read) trying to balance a somber take on the AIDS epidemic with something more fun and vivacious. I’m not upset at the attempt at blending the two, but neither worked in isolation or in tandem. We were told the main character was grieving his ex partner and a plethora of friends. But the writing felt divorced from emotion entirely, leaving me feeling nothing (not even emptiness). The ‘fun’ characters were sabotaged by inauthentic dialogue, which would have raised the quality of this book immensely. I think this book could work really well for folks who dislike needing to infer while reading, and prefer the author to directly deliver what characters are feeling. This is a perfectly valid preference, but not one I share.

Merchants of Knowledge and Magic by Erika McCorkle

I was really sad to put this book down. This book was utterly unafraid to throw a lot of classic fantasy elements out the window, which drew me in immediately. There were lots of really interesting worldbuilding elements going on (tons of different species, including an asexual and intersex main character who is the child of a gigantic space dragonfly and a mind elemental), large scale politics going on, merchants of various non-monetary things (knowledge, magic, and pleasure, among others), and a setup for some ambitious story beats. This book takes all the trappings of epic fantasy, twists them up, and turns them into a magic mirror on an acid trip.

Unfortunately, I didn’t find any of the major characters believably written, thought that the worldbuilding was tonally inconsistent, and struggled with balancing various plot threads. Layer onto all that the fact that I found the prose to be subpar – very didactic, odd flow in many places, and consistently pulled me out of the story. I got to the halfway point and realized I was forcing myself to read instead of enjoying my time with it. For an alternative review, see this review for a significantly more positive take on the book.

The West Passage by Jared Pechacek

This book was sold to me as a novel for people who love The Spear Cuts Through Water (perhaps my favorite book of all time), which made it easy to pick up. I ended up making it to the halfway point before putting the book down. A big part of that decision was because it was a bad fit for my mood. The West Passage is dense and confusing, interested in being stylistically alien and tough to parse. I would say the book is an intersection of New Weird, Epic Fantasy, and Gothic Horror, which is a really interesting blend. The sort of novel where you don’t realize for twenty pages that a character is actually a hive of bees because the author didn’t mention it. Lots of really cool ideas.

However, I was in the middle of a moderate bout of depression and needed mindless popcorn reads that don’t ask you to put in much work. It’s still on my bookshelf, and I hope to give it another try someday. Definitely read if you’re looking for something bespoke, unique, and weird. For an alternative take, here’s a review of someone who loved it.

Also, the cover art is just stunning.

The Steel Remains by Richard Morgan

I actually did finish this book, but immediately after finishing discovered that the author is a massive TERF. Straight men, if you don’t support the queer community, you can fuck off with having us as your protagonists. The gay lead didn’t feel particularly authentic in how he dealt with rampant homophobia (it wasn’t glaringly bad, just not what I was hopeful for). I thought the book was good but not great, and certainly not good enough for to continue knowing the author is queerphobic.