top ten tuesday: the last 10 books I’ve abandoned.

Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.

This week’s topic is Books On My Fall 2022 To-Read List. I didn’t have much to say about this topic. It’s not that I don’t have a fall to-read list. But rather, I have a lot of books checked out from the library right now because all my holds became available at the same time. So as of today, I’m just focusing on reading all of them.

But having a lot of books checked out from the library made me realize that this year, I’ve really gotten into prioritizing books I want to read and abandoning books I don’t. I decided that if a book is not holding my interest I’m not going to waste my time reading it. I try to read at least 50 pages and then, if I am not loving a book, I reassess. One of the things I think about is if I never finished the book and never find out how it ended or what happened to the characters, would I be mad or always wonder what happened. If the answer is No, then I abandon the book. So this week I decided to tell you about the last 10 books I’ve abandoned.

Here are the Last 10 Books I’ve Abandoned:

1. The Boardwalk Bookshop by Susan Mallery. I don’t think I’ve read a Susan Mallery book before and I don’t know if it was the writing or the characters but no one was interesting to me. Also, there was not enough bookshop.

2. Out of the Corner by Jennifer Grey. I feel really bad that I abandoned this book because I love Jennifer Grey in Dirty Dancing and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. However, there was something about this memoir that made it difficult to read. I don’t know if it was all the cursing or the fact that she tells us about her whole life from the time she was young to now, I just couldn’t get into it.

3. Hide by Kiersten White. I went into this book thinking it was one thing and realized it was something completely different. I was looking for more of a psychological thriller and I realized that this book was more supernatural. I did flip through it, however, to verify and quickly decided I didn’t want to read anymore.

4. Meant To Be by Emily Giffin. I felt like I was reading fanfiction about JFK Jr. but it was not as interesting as him.

5. Second First Impressions by Sally Thorne. I just couldn’t get into the characters. The main character was so sad and boring. I also got really tired of hearing about the male character’s long flowing hair hanging loose everywhere. I kept picturing him as a dark-haired Fabio which just makes me shudder.

6. In My Dreams I Hold a Knife by Ashley Winstead. I got about 5 chapters into this book and I found the main character to be so insufferable that I couldn’t read about her anymore. I don’t know what happens in this book but if you told me she gets murdered, I would not be sad.

7. The Paradox Hotel by Rob Hart. I was super excited for this story about time travel but I didn’t really find it that interesting after reading 50 or so pages.

8. A Letter To Three Witches by Elizabeth Bass. This one just didn’t hold my interest. Again, I stopped reading after a few chapters.

9. The Rest of the Story by Sarah Dessen. I haven’t read a Sarah Dessen book in a while so I picked this one up. Unfortunately, the teenage drama didn’t resonate with me and I just couldn’t care about all their trivial issues. I stopped reading when the main character was agonizing over whether she should go by her name or a nickname for the summer.

10. The Berlin Exchange by Joseph Kanon. I wanted to love this spy novel but I really struggled with the writing and all of the German geography. I’m sorry, but I don’t know where all these streets are and the names of the neighborhoods so the fact that the author was telling me that the characters are walking down and turning onto all these streets means nothing to me.

What books have you abandoned lately?