Lauren Blatter and Lauren Bergen have been in the same reading group — their Slack channel is called the Book Club Babes — for 15 years. Besides first names, they also share an age (38) and a voracious devotion to reading.
Yet when it comes to DNF, these BFFs are N&D.
Translation: They may be friends, but they’re night and day when it comes to when, if ever, to DNF — shorthand for “did not finish” — a book.
“There are too many books out there to read books you don’t like,” said Blatter.
“You have to finish a book,” countered Bergen.
There’s nothing new about not finishing a book. Trudging through a novel you don’t like can feel like a waste of time, and it can be tough calculus predicting if it’s going to get better.
But the divide over whether DNF is business as usual, or a cop-out, was ignited anew this spring, when Goodreads, the book rating and tracking app, added a “Did Not Finish” shelf where users can stow books that they’ve put down, for good or for another day. (It was already an option on Storygraph and other reading apps.)
“If a book isn’t working for you,” the company announced on Instagram, “it’s always OK to move on.”
In a statement, Cybil Wallace, the managing editor of Goodreads, said a DNF option “has been one of the Goodreads community’s most requested features.”
“The response to and engagement with the ‘Did Not Finish’ shelf has been overwhelmingly positive,” she said last month.
For Bergen, DNF does not compute: She’s never not finished a novel.
“I feel the need to see what happens, especially if a book is in the zeitgeist,” she said. “I don’t want to DNF it and not have a full opinion.”
Never DNFers have good reasons. To engage fully with an author’s intent, and have an informed point of view about it. To complete a series. Because BookTok or the Pulitzer Prize committee liked it. Because Oprah, Reese or Jenna said so.
Because “it feels good to finish stuff,” and doing so can be a vanity metric with social media bragging rights, said Brock Covington, who runs a book club for literary fiction and classic literature.
But many readers can’t live without the option to quit. Ashley Ross, another 38-year-old Book Club Babe, has given up on several books, including Eleanor Catton’s “The Luminaries.” (Hardly a shock: The 2013 Booker Prize winner is 800-plus pages.)
“I don’t think a writer would want you to hang out in the world and not enjoy it,” she said. “If you didn’t want to be at a party with these people, you would leave. That’s how I feel about a book.”
Not that DNFing means a book is dead and buried. Ross frequently gives books second or third chances. (“It’s more like BRB or TTYL,” she said.) She’ll sometimes switch to the audiobook, as she did with Ann Patchett’s essay collection “These Precious Days.”
“I listened to it and loved it,” she said.
There are as many reasons to DNF as there are books at the bookstore. A book’s length. A reader’s mood, free time or physical location. An author’s style, or lack of it. Cost, too: If you shell out $30 for a new hardcover, you might feel an obligation to finish. (Less so if you get the book at a library, where there’s a countdown to a due date.)
Jason Blitman, the producer and host of the podcast Gays Reading, said he tries to read at least a quarter of a book “to give the art a chance.” He made it through about 40 percent of Hanya Yanagihara’s “A Little Life.”
“The writing is beautiful but the content was relentless trauma,” he said. “I asked people around me, does it get better? Do these people live an OK life? The answer was no, so I stopped.”
But even lifelong DNFers often feel bad about closing the book — that it’s a sign of a quitter, or that they’re too stupid to not see what Oprah saw in the prose. Covington said the decision to DNF, as he did with “Emma” — “Austen just wasn’t wowing me,” he said — depends on why a person reads.
“If you read for information, finishing has benefit,” said Covington, who last year put out a YouTube video called “When to DNF a Book.” “But if reading is a form of escapism or entertainment or distraction from work or stress, and your book becomes another unpleasant aspect to the day, it’s time to find another book.”
Authors check out, too. The novelist Harlan Coben once told The New York Times he had “no qualms about abandoning books that suck. I’m not afraid to do it on Page 1 or Page 100.”
Hayley Gelfuso, whose “Book of Lost Hours” was a “Good Morning America” Book Club Pick, said she became a “chronic DNFer” after having a child.
“My reading time is very constricted to maybe 20 minutes at the end of the day,” she said. “If a book’s not keeping my attention, I tend to walk away from it quickly.”
The novelist Claire Lombardo has said see ya to books in as few as five pages.
“I need to be grabbed by a voice,” she said. “If I’m not in those early pages, it’s a sign that it’s not what I’m meant to be reading.”
Getting DNFd can sting. Lombardo, who teaches fiction writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, said she “felt like a failure as an author” after reading on social media that people had stopped reading her 2019 debut novel, “The Most Fun We Ever Had.” By the time her second book, “Same as It Ever Was,” came out five years later, she’d made peace with DNF.
“I would rather they DNF it than hate-read it and dislike me more,” she said. “It doesn’t feel great, but not every book is for every reader. The longer I have books out in the world, the more I accept that.”
Last month, the Book Club Babes spent a spirited hour debating “Yesteryear,” Caro Claire Burke’s hit novel about a tradwife monfluencer.
“One star,” Bergen said.
“Four and a half stars,” Blatter rebutted, adding that most of the Babes thought it was hard to put down — “a really good book club book,” she said.
Despite her review, Bergen said she spite-finished “Yesteryear” because she prides herself on being a member of the literary equivalent of the Clean Plate Club.
“I have hope that a book will get better, or maybe there’s something I missed,” she said.
To Blatter, Bergen might as well have been speaking Klingon.
“Lauren reads books through and then she’ll say, ‘I hated it,’” she said, laughing. “I’m like, why did you do that to yourself?”
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