Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Almost Put Down

A weekly meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish

So I've said this before, I have a very hard time DNFing a book. I like to give books the benefit of the doubt that it will get better. Sometimes this comes back to bit me in the butt and the book doesn't get any better and sometimes it ends up working in my favor and I end up enjoying it. But what I don't have a hard time doing is wanting to stop reading them. Many a book I consider putting down. It's one of the reasons I always read multiple books. So this question wasn't all that hard for me. The hardest part was narrowing it down to ten, so I broke it up into two categories.

Books That Ended Up Getting Good 

1.) Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates 
This is kind of cheating because I did put this one down. But I picked it up after a long absence only to realize that it was just about to get interesting. A huge dramatic thing was about to happen and the book left me intrigued and emotionally wrecked afterwards! I was glad I went back to it but it ruined me for DNFing books for a long time.

 2.) The Sherlockian by Graham Moore 
I read this book at a time where I was reading too much Historical Mystery and I was feeling a little burned out to the genre. But I powered through and ended up really enjoying the twist and it was very well researched. This book was another example of how it got good immediately after I almost put it down.

 3.) The Burning Sky by Sherry Thomas
Another example of feeling burned out from a specific genre. I read this back in January for my High Fantasy month and that was a bit too overwhelming. I put it down, read a few other books, went back to it and it ended up having a really exciting ending!

 4.) Side Effects May Vary by Julie Murphy
When I started this one I wasn't sure about the characters. The protagonist was not at all likable and it made the start of the book a little frustrating but as it went on I started empathizing with her and understanding her motivations more. The ending was very satisfying and I was glad I stuck it out.

 5.) Stardust by Neil Gaiman 
So hear me out... This was my first Gaiman. Everyone was raving about how fantastic he was as an author so I had high expectation. I had also just finished the A Song of Ice and Fire series and read the first two Grisha trilogy books, so it wasn't a fair fight. But the ending was enjoyable and I'm glad I didn't give up.

 Books That Didn't Get Better 

6.) Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton
I blame myself for this one. I knew it was an incomplete book but I still read it and expected Jurassic Park standards from Crichton. This book was posted posthumously and was incomplete and believe me it felt that way. It had all the world-building but no plot or character development. I should have known better!

 7.) A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness
I really didn't like this book. It just felt unoriginal with unlikable characters and a storyline that could have been fantastic but fell extremely flat. It had some serious first book syndrome and some even more serious insta-love. It was an adult book that felt like a really poorly done YA.

 8.) The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne 
I have always been really interested in old houses and their secrets. I also love Gothic literature and this book seemed to fit both categories. But it just wasn't all that interesting. I should have stopped reading it but I didn't. I mostly felt compelled to read it because I bought it at the actual house the book is based on.

 9.) Three Princes by Ramon Wheeler 
I should have remembered that I don't like alternate histories and passed on this book. But even worse than that this book was pretty much all about world-building and there was almost no plot. But it was my first ARC and I really didn't want to DNF!

 10.) Mr Darcy, Vampyre by Amanda Grange 
This was one if the first books I reviewed for this blog. It was at a time where supernatural retellings of classic novels and vampires were all the rage. But in the case of this one it was just too much dramatic irony and made one of my favorite characters in literature, Lizzie Bennett, unlikable.

What books did you want to put down but didn't? Have you read any of these books and did you want to put them down too? Leave me a comment with your thoughts. Thanks for stopping by and HAPPY READING!