The other day my husband and I ate popcorn and drank Diet Snapple in front of a BookTube vlog chat. “Why didn’t you DNF it?” the thirtysomething vlogger asked a guest.
My husband is new to BookTube. “What’s DNF?” he asked me.
“’Did not finish.’” How I know this, where I learned this, how I translated it I cannot say. It’s just there, it’s in the air, it’s on the internet.
The guest vlogger told the hostess that he didn’t DNF because the book was a prize finalist and “too serious.” He seemed shocked by the DNF question.
He’s a little older than his vlogger hostess, so perhaps he isn’t as casual about putting aside a book. It probably is a generational thing. We didn’t grow up DNF-ing. In general I finish the books I start, though I recently gave up re–reading David Copperfield after 300 pages.
My husband vaguely disapproves of the DNF concept. Only under extraordinary circumstances does he not finish a book. I do reject many new, much-lauded books, but I admit, I can’t remember not finishing a book till my thirties, when I gave up on the fifth volume of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.
Perhaps if we’d had the acronym DNF we wouldn’t feel obligated to finish our books. Language does influence our views. And DNF is so cute: I like the sound of it, but on some level it trivializes the act of finishing a book. It implies that we deserve instant gratification, and that we should stop reading any book that ceases to amuse us. It’s not to stick it to the man, like Smith in The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner; we’re giving up the race because we’re self-indulgent.
Still, David Copperfield is a shocking book to DNF, isn’t it? But perhaps I didn’t quite DNF it, since I’ve already read it four times.
This reminds me of when my brother listened to my podcast ep about tbr piles and told me later that we never explained what tbr stood for – we just expected everyone to know!
I, too, use TBR in conversation. The one that recently baffled me was FOMO!
What does FOMO stand for?
Robert Graves edited down David Copperfield to what he thought was its essence. Dickens is one of those writers where – as Calvino would put it – there’s no need to actually read him, because he’s in the literary air. It’s tempting with Dickens not just to DNF but to DNS (Did Not Start) and just reread your favourite bits, which means you swallow faults you liked years ago and don’t notice good bits you didn’t appreciate then. An argument for rereading new copies of books: they don’t fall open at the previous pages.
FOMO is Fear of Missing Out. Perhaps that’s not as commonly used as the other.
I admit, I have not read Graves’s David Copperfield. But I laugh at your assessment of Dickens: I do, as a rule, love his work; he is a great stylist, but not always. Never thought of the DNS, but that’s a good one. Perhaps reading a few pages and then rejecting it is a DNS. Not enough to be a DNF, too much to be a DNS?
On some book blog i read about giving a book a try for 50 pages (or your age if >50!) then dropping off it if it isnt compelling enough to draw you along. Its worked pretty well for me, I usually end up finishing but there have been a few…
I last 20 or 25. Once I read 200 before giving up. But, like you, I usually keep going, because I pick my books carefully. Still, I read one new book this year that I deeply disliked, but I kept going because it was well-written!