Reading Record DNF

 Since I'm keeping track now, I'll also record things I dropped.

Which may sound awful or something, but...I couldn't keep going.

I won't name the book/author, since that would be like publicly shaming them, but I will say that it's something that had been sitting on my shelf waiting for me to read it for years.  And that it was something I had backed on Kickstarter back in the days when I was far less cynical than I am now.  😰

The plot and setting seemed interesting, though their Victorian England didn't entirely feel properly Victorian.  Not that there were many direct anachronisms; it was more the tone, the sense, of the setting that felt too modern.

That's not why I decided to give up on it, though.  It was all the problems that a professional editor would have fixed.

When it was just the rather samey sentence structure, the overly dense description of fairly minute physical details surrounding the lead (while not describing his emotional reactions all that strongly), some missing commas, and the occasional missing indentation at the start of a paragraph, that was livable.  Nothing worth quitting a book over.

Then I got further in, and reached conversations, especially ones between multiple people...

Five or six lines of dialog, from three or four different characters...

...all in the same paragraph.

Not just once, either.

It happened repeatedly.

It was like the author thought paragraphs had to be a certain length to be allowed to exist.

Reading it was frankly excruciating.  I just couldn't keep going.

I know that is a risk you run when you read something self-published, but...ugh.  Clearly, I've been spoiled by the Eternal Library series, which are well-written and edited despite being Kickstarted.

Anyway, I am gonna switch now to something that was actually published by an actual publisher and sold in bookstores.  There should be no way it will have any of the problems this other thing had!