Book Meme, part 4

For inspirethoughts: 21. A book you gave up on, and the reasons why.

I give up on books with a fair amount of regularity - or, at least, more regularity than I used to, when I grimly read just about everything to the end. Nowadays I’ll give something up because it’s boring, too technical, not what I’m in the mood for right then, due back at the library and someone else has a hold on it so I can’t renew it and I don’t care enough to sit down and steamroll through it before the due date...

I think the book I abandoned most recently is Charles Darwin’s On the Origins of Species. I’d heard it was charmingly written despite being a 150 year old science book, but the part I read was baffling rather than charming, and life is just too short for this sort of thing.

I also gave up on Naomi Novik's Uprooted, which at the time I meant to get back to, but the more I think about it the less I want to read the romance that, I have been informed, is going to unfold as the book continues. Whyyyy do authors have to lard their books up with unnecessary romances?