Top Ten Tuesday #162

Hi all! I hope you’ve all had a good week since I last did one of these, once again, mine has been pretty quiet, but my family is going on holiday to France next week, so I’m pretty excited about that.

Anyway, since it’s Tuesday, that means another Top Ten Tuesday from Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl and this week we’re talking DNFing. Now the original topic was Books I DNFed Too Quickly, but I have the opposite problem, I always feel like I need to give a book another chance even if it is boring me to tears, so instead, I’m going to be talking about Books I Regret Finishing. Here we go, the books I powered through even though they were boring me and that I wish I had put down!:

1. Not If I Save You First-Ally Carter

Honestly, if this hadn’t been a book I was reading for a Netgalley review, I would have DNFed it. I loved Ally Carter’s Heist Society books, so I was excited for this one but it turned out to be such a disappointment. I expect survival stories to be at least a little bit exciting but after 200 pages of wandering around in the wilderness, I was ready to scratch my eyes out. So yeah, kind of wish I’d just left this one.

2. Wintersong-S.Jae Jones

If I hadn’t received this from an #otspsecretsister, then again, I probably would have finished it, but I felt like I had to. I was so disappointed in this one as it sound so cool and different to anything I’d read before, but the story really dragged and I was so confused the whole time. I wished I had DNFed it rather than struggling through all 500 odd pages of it!

3. The Fandom-Anna Day

This was a really creative idea, but it wasn’t executed well. I liked the idea of falling into your favourite story and finding out that it wasn’t what you thought, but I struggled so much with the book, it was so slow, the plot was so predictable and it took me so LONG to read. If it hadn’t been an ARC, honestly, I would have put it down.

4. And I Darken-Kiersten White

I got into such a massive slump when I read this book last year, I was reading it for weeks and weeks and just wasn’t getting into it at all, but I stubbornly refused to put it down even though I should have, because I thought it would get better. I wanted to love it, because a female Vlad the Impaler sounded like such a great idea, but it was such a dense book, so full of politics and religion and it moved at such a slow pace that I was stuck on it for weeks. I should have taken a hint and passed on it before I got slumpy!

5. Glass Sword-Victoria Aveyard

This one pains me so much because I have my copy signed and personalised by the author, which means I am now stuck with it forever! This book was so slow and I found Mare so annoying and it just felt like way too much book for the plot that it had to accomplish. I should have cut my losses with this one and given up, rather than struggled all the way to the end for a series that I’m not going to finish.

6. The Invisible Library-Genevieve Cogman

This one was such a disappointment! You think that when you see a book with Library in the title that it’s going to be amazing right? Well not this one, at least not for me. The world in this was super confusing, the characters were flat and the chapters were far too long. I actually put this book down for like a month to read other books because I was struggling with this one so much and I really shouldn’t have picked it back up to finish it.

7. Stealing Snow-Danielle Paige

THIS BOOK, MY GOODNESS. Even being able to write a scathing review of it when I finished wasn’t worth the pain it put me through. If it hadn’t been a Netgalley book, I wouldn’t have finished it. There was a love quadrangle for crying out loud! The pace was so off, the world building barely existed, it was all just bad. I should have cut my losses and given up, even if the end was mildly interesting.

8. Graceling-Kristin Cashore

If this book hadn’t been part of my #RockMyTBR Challenge in 2016, I would not have finished it. I was so bored for most of the book, and Katsa really bothered me, she was the classic Strong Female Character trope that to be a Strong Female Character, you can only be strong and you have to not understand emotions and despise anything feminine. Honestly, I should have given this one up, but since it was quite a short book, I pushed through. I wish I hadn’t.

9. Allegiant-Veronica Roth

I swear, if I didn’t have Must Finish Series Syndrome, I would not have finished this book. It was so long and slow and really not a great ending to the trilogy. I actually didn’t mind the controversial end, it was the rest of the book that I had a problem with! I wish I hadn’t wasted my time with this last book in the series, it wasn’t worth it to read several hundred pages of padding just to find out how everything ended.

10. Slated-Teri Terry

This book was such a slog to get through! I had a pretty bad reading year back in 2015, and books like this were part of the reason why. Slated was so slow and Kyla was so bland and I hated the author’s writing style. I could have saved myself a lot of time if I’d just given this one up!

11. Panic-Lauren Oliver

Another one of my 2015 disasters. I expected this one to be totally different to what it was, so imagine my surprise when I opened this up, expecting a dystopian and getting a contemporary instead! The idea of the game of Panic was really cool, but I hated all of the characters and honestly the story just bored me. Again, I could have saved myself a lot of time if I’d just given up.

12. The Fault In Our Stars-John Green

I know a lot of people love this book, but it just wasn’t for me and I knew that before picking it up so honestly, I should have just left it, but I didn’t and I wish I had given it up rather than toiling through it because I knew it wasn’t a book for me and that wasn’t going to change no matter how far through I got.

13. The Curious Incident of The Dog In The Nighttime-Mark Haddon

This was quite a short book so I don’t regret finishing it quite as much as some of the books on this list, but I still wish I had put it down because it wasn’t particularly entertaining.

14. Lord of The Flies-William Golding

Honestly, if I hadn’t had to read this one for school, I wouldn’t have read it at all! So in this book’s case, it’s not so much that I regret finishing it, because I had to, in order to get a good grade in my English GCSE, it’s more that I regret that I had to read it in the first place.

So there we go, Books That I Regret Finishing! Am I being too harsh on some of these? Do you agree with me on any of these? Let me know in the comments!

Next week, we’re talking Books That Awaken The Travel Bug In Me, so I’ll be talking about places that I’ve been inspired to visit by the books I’ve read.

In the meantime, I just finished Ace of Shades, so I will have my review of that up for you guys tomorrow.