what makes me keep reading a book?
the art of the dnf
Everyone picks up a book for a different reason.
Take “Sunrise on the Reaping,” the latest from Suzanne Collins. Did you buy it to keep up with The Hunger Games series, or in anticipation of the movie adaptation of it? Perhaps there was a more nostalgic reason; if you’re like me and you haven’t read a Hunger Games book in years, you might pick up “Sunrise on the Reaping” because you liked Haymitch when you first read “The Hunger Games,” and you want to read his story.
But when we’re in the thick of the book, why do we keep reading? Why do we stop?
When it comes to a book in a series like “Sunrise on the Reaping,” one where we’re accustomed to the author's prose and that’s part of a larger universe that we’re already familiar with, it’s almost easier to finish it than a standalone novel. When we get into a series like The Hunger Games, the lore we grow to know and understand makes us want to consume more and more content from the author about these characters and their world. We care about the stakes.
Yet, it’s not like that with every book series.
When I was in high school, I tried desperately to get into the ACOTAR series by Sarah J. Maas. I went in liking that the first book was essentially a Beauty and the Beast retelling. I had friends recommending it to me left and right.
Yet, I didn’t even make it halfway through when I officially DNF’d it.
For me, marking a book as “DNF,” or “did not finish,” follows the same guidelines for turning off a movie. There must be some aspect of it that caused me to detach and lose interest.
So, why did I stick around to find out how Katniss’s story ends in The Hunger Games series, but not Feyre’s in ACOTAR? It’s been a while since I cracked open either book, but I still know that my largest reason for DNFing “A Court of Thorns and Roses” was how anticlimactic I found it. Simply put, I couldn’t care to continue.
When Katniss volunteers for tribute in Prim’s place, the weight of her sacrifice radiates off the pages. The consequences are deadly and very, very intriguing. Not saying that Feyre’s consequential journey to Prythian isn’t filled with danger in its own ways, but it did not hit the same mark for me; what awaited her didn’t keep me interested enough to keep reading.
I prefer Collins as a writer to Maas, particularly in how she writes about her characters. Still, “The Hunger Games” is more compelling to me than “A Court of Thorns and Roses” because of my subjective preference for how the authors build their worlds, craft their characters, foreshadow and add tension to their plot, write their dialogue, etc. For me, it’s not the genre that makes the story; it’s the story that makes the story and its parts.
Let’s look at a book that’s not part of a larger series. When I chose The Kingdom of Sweets by Erika Johansen as my Book of the Month in December of 2023, I was down for a Nutcracker retelling. When I got into the book, I was genuinely intrigued by the sisterly dynamic between Clara and Natasha and their family drama. The set-up didn’t bore me. Yet, I ultimately DNF’d.
I lost interest as soon as the plot began to thicken, and the sugary sweet deceptions of Johansen’s version of the Sugar Plum Fairy took hold. It’s not that I didn’t like Johansen’s prose; I lost interest in the plot, it lost momentum, and I became bored. The pacing began to slow where the plot should have picked up, and no amount of wintery folklore or Gothic fantasy could save the book for me.
So, it’s not always the characterizations. Sometimes, it’s something as simple as the pacing.
Let’s go back to the Hunger Games for a second. In the first book in the series, as soon as Katniss and Peeta are whisked off to the Capitol, the story kicks into full gear. You don’t want to stop reading; you need to know what will happen to these characters, even if they aren’t fully fleshed out yet. Collins has built up the stakes enough already so that you care about what will happen to her protagonists. And even if you don’t care, a part of you is still curious about what the titular games will consist of.
So, build the stakes early. But what if the stakes ultimately disinterest me early on in the book, like in “ACOTAR?”
DNFing is very subjective. We decide to pick up and put down books for different reasons.
Sometimes, the characters capture us from the start, so much so that many years later, when we first picked up a book in a series like The Hunger Games, we’re still hungry for more content, even when the arc of a protagonist such as Katniss has ended. Collins is a master at making us interested in the backstories of characters we may have completely glossed over when we first read the books in her series. I, for one, never really considered how President Snow went rotten until she announced “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.” Yet, many other fans did, and were heavily appeased.
Haymitch Abernathy has been one of my favorite characters in The Hunger Games since I first picked up the first book in the series. I’m certain I’ll finish “Sunrise on the Reaping.” I’m too invested in the series and Haymitch’s arc to even think of DNFing it.
When you take a look at a series like The Hunger Games, you realize that part of the reason it’s so successful is that it was able to get you hooked on it very early on in the first book. Maybe not every series can do that for me, no matter how much I want it to. If there’s one thing that the craft of the series has taught me, it’s to hook your writers early and establish suspense and high stakes early on.