DNF - and I don't care.... or do I?

I've always been a voracious reader. And there was a time when I read anything and everything. I devoured it all, the good, the weird, the wonderful and even the bad.
Looking back at my youthful reading days I do not recall ever pushing the ejector button on a book and jettisoning it out the airlock into official DNF territory. No, I slogged through incomprehensible Russian Opera's, sci-fi books that pushed the boundary of logic and sometimes commonsense. I ground my teeth and persevered as arrogant males swept feisty virgin after feisty virgin off her dancing shoes and true love finally won the day. Politics, thrillers, chillers, horror, romance, sci-fi, and every other genre was treated as a mission to be completed. And by heck, I did.

But that was then... and this is now. And my DNF pile of books is in real danger of toppling over and crushing the very life out of me. My kindle is so full of DNF e-books that it makes little growling noises as I pass by and seriously looks like it might take a chunk out of one of my ankles. Thankfully it's so bloated that it's not as fast as it used to be.

So what has changed?

Me? Totally. I don't have the patience I once had. My time is a lot more precious these days and if I'm not reading something I love, or have the potential to love, then I could be doing a hundred other more worthwhile things... that next season of Outlander isn't going to watch itself now, is it.

The Industry? Yes. Definitely. The sheer volume of books out there, and finding those five star needles amongst the stacks and stacks of regular needles takes a full time research grant and team of ten to sort through reviews, read the Look Inside, and do a full background check on the author.

I've developed a little warning system when it comes to potential DNF candidates. Things to look out for in the book blurb and the reviews that set my inner robot clamouring - Danger, Danger, Will Robinson.
Now, I'm not saying there aren't exceptions to these rules, just that they are few and far between.

- Virgin female leads. Unless she's wicked smart and kick ass, count me out.

- Kick ass female leads must be counted on to be consistently kick ass. No crying. No claiming to be kick ass but never delivering.

- Male leads can be arrogant alphas, but they have to have other layers to them. And they need to value and respect the women in their lives.

-Spanking... and not the good kind. I'm talking as a means of controlling the female lead. Where she's not doing what she's told, or giving up the information she has and the Male Lead, instead of holding a discussion, resorts to spanking her. This of course leads to the female lead rubbing her sore bottom, resenting the Alpha for a few chapters before inevitably falling into bed with him... no thank you.

- Stilted dialogue.

- Never ending information dumps.

- Over using the Thesaurus. Quit with all the descriptives and get on with the story already.

- Being all about the plot at the expense of the characters.

- Being all about the characters at the expense of the plot

- Stereotypes... boring, bland and just plain lazy.

- Cliffhanger endings, all the time, every time, with not enough parts of the story resolved in each instalment to at least give me some partial closure.

- Female leads who moan, whine and resent the male lead, have sex with him anyway, and then go on to blame him for that too. Grrr, woman, own your choices and step up.

- Grim, dark, never ending hopelessness. The world, the characters, the story. I need a glimmer of hope, a thread of humour, something to keep me trudging onwards through utter bleakness to what I can only hope is a HEA.

- And the biggest DNF flashing red warning sign? The lack of sheer joy, and flow in the written word. If the author doesn't love their world, their characters. If they haven't invested... then why the hell do they think I, as a reader, would want to?

So, I've just started this new book. It has the potential to go either way, the male lead is annoyingly superior, and the female lead says she's all sorts of capable but hasn't done anything to prove it as yet.
So this could be a DNF in the making, on the other hand, if I'm not reading I should probably start cleaning out the spare room. Maybe do something about that large pile of DNF books taking up too much space... nah, I'd rather just keep reading.