Short primer here on the meme of Too Long; Didn’t Read.
Got that? <Takes deep breath.> Okay, then.
There’s a funny, helpful, snarky meme out in the world right now, dating back over a decade. Sometimes it’s used to signify a short summary of a longer article, for reader convenience. That’s fine. Sometimes it’s used to call out an excessively long online post, in a more-or-less friendly way. That’s fine too. I’ve written my share of those.
Where tl;dr gets my hackles up is when I see it in a book or article review, often paired with ‘Dropped’ or ‘Did Not Finish’. Often written in an airy context, as if the reviewer wasn’t that invested in the project to begin with, and had just found something more interesting, like their toenails.
Well, excuuuuuuuuse me for finding that unbelievably annoying. Both as a writer and a reader.
It’s disrespectful not only to the author, but to the other readers who did manage to navigate the book/story/article/Wiki entry/bus map.
It’s another thinly-disguised morsel of indulgent anti-intellectualism, possibly worse than functional illiteracy. The person who writes tl;dr in a review knows how to read. They just choose not to. Then celebrate their laziness as some kind of efficiency.
I have stopped reading books and whole series before. But I don’t boast about it, because that’s a sad development for me. A story that cannot entertain me and make me care about it? Wow, that’s bad. I’m easy – I’ll browse Wikipedia and The Silmarillion for fun. I love books, and I want to finish each one I open. It’s taken me decades to be comfortable stopping partway through, and never returning.
That’s why I’m delighted with sample texts online. A chapter or two in, and I can usually tell if the rest is worthwhile. Samples save me time, and the effort of reviewing something that may not be worth giving it a one-star rating.
Ironically enough, tl;dr reviewers also save me time, when I go look at the books they *did* finish. My experience has been that I probably won’t like them, either.
I don’t finish every book I start to read. If I find out after a few pages that it isn’t what I thought it was going to be then I might choose to bow out. Doesn’t happen often, but it can happen.
“Here, Lorn, read this! I *loved* it!” enthuses a friend, lending me a book. And I begin, earnestly, to discover that the reason she loved it is the way the author weaves the arcana of stamp-collecting into the narrative, or that it’s a romance as sickly-sweet as a cup of coffee with four sugars. I probably won’t finish the book; not my area of interest, not my taste.
And never mind the arcana of stamp-collecting, I’ve had the opportunity to read a couple of volumes about how the Illuminati are supposed to be taking over the world, which made my brain go dry with the racism, sexism and blind ethnocentrism that filled the pages. And there was the time my then-partner’s housemate lent me a tome about Saturn’s influence on human mental processes and behaviours. It was like wading through treacle – the concepts were opaque to me. Curiosity outweighed by puzzlement, outrage, and sadness, I didn’t finish those either. (They were short, for the record.)
tl;dr makes no sense to me, though. If the reader is interested in the story, why should it matter if the story is a long one? I can understand people giving up on a book that really isn’t speaking to them but length alone can’t be a deterrent, surely?
As a line in a review, it seems to me to say more about the reviewer than the book. (Are you sure it doesn’t stand for ‘too lazy; didn’t read’?)
Might as well be. Although I wonder if it’s laziness or a poor attention span?
Sometimes I can’t budget the hours for a long book or series, but I’d keep it in mind for later – if every other indication makes me think I’d enjoy it.
I read fast. Some of my friends read more slowly, so they’re careful about jumping into huge books. I’ve no problem with that. If lazy readers didn’t want to read it, why talk about it?
OTOH, there’s a DNF review on Goodreads that has actually sold copies of Moro, according to the readers who emailed me later.