i am so bored and uninterested in the plot and all the characters. snooze fest.

idk im not feeling this one right now ! idk i don’t care about this book at all. i am not interested by it rn. might come back to it later in 2025, might not! 

this book just seems to ramble on with no true direction, and i actually don’t give a flying fart about any of the characters. that’s all this book has going for it. it feels like pulling teeth. plus i’m sorry books with extremely long chapters automatically lose points for me. maybe ill come back to this, but i don’t get why it’s so loved when it just rambles and rambles and rambles. 

i might try to come back to this in 2025 but right now this is a miss 

oh my god i’m so bored. GET TO THE STORY. 
i have no idea why this is so popular nothing interesting has happened and i’m a quarter in 

yeah sadly i don’t think this book is my style. i thought it was! very much so at the beginning! but as i’ve read more i’ve realised this (obv) focuses a lot on rowing which…. i don’t care about. at all. i am not a sports fan. i like playing sports but watching it? no thanks. 

when chapters were about joe & his home life i was having fun, but now the book is about the meat of rowing and i couldn’t care less ❤️‍🩹

i need to be real..... im not having fun.
i started reading this as a reading challenge in bookishreality's discord server & i was like "oh maybe after i pass 50% ill be having fun!"
nope.
i have no motivation or care to pick this back up again now that I've passed the halfway mark. i dont care about the count. i don't care. this book drags on so fucking much. did dumas get paid per page or some shit because seriously this book doesn't need to be almost 2k pages long. half of the time dumas is just describing the colour of a fucking brick that a house is built with or something. 
some chapters are fun, but honestly they're too few & far between for me to care about them. 
also i wanted to finish this because this is literally the one book my grandma has finished in her entire life. i wanted to bond with her about it. she enjoyed it. but i mean she also was born in post WWII serbia in a tiny village. welp, sorry grandma. this book was ass. i get if you had literally nothing else to do but..... its a no from me im afraid

i am so sorry god i wish i liked this more!
sorry its such a minor pet peeve when books use overly-flowerly language. like yes some description is needed but.,.. this book was too much.
i told myself in 2024 to dnf any book that does not spark joy, and this book did not spark joy at all.
yeah i know im not really giving this book a chance but honestly i dont want to.
that sounds mean
idk i just didn't like it & where it was going!
mayhaps a future pick-up (i highly doubt it sadly)

sorry you are joining the pile of DNF
there's a couple reasons im stopping this:

might pick this up in the future but for know its bye bye to the dnf pile 😔

sorry i find this book a bit too slow-paced for my tastes at the moment. maybe later down the track i’ll finish this but im not interested in reading slow-paced books at the moment 😔