Every novel is boring until it isn't

Example: Anna Karenina. Gripping from the opening line (if you like the type of novel that it is; and it's fine if you don't, of course).

Or alternatively, Pride and Prejudice. Again, that opener just sucks you in (if this is a book for you, that is; and again, if it's not -- totally fine).

Example of a modern page-turner: The Hunger Games. If you are bored with this novel after three pages, you shouldn't read any further, because it's absolutely, certainly, not for you.

Or, Jeebus, Harry-Freaking-Potter. There is a reason that an entire generation grew up reading those books.

Or: "The Time Traveller's Wife", "The Poisonwood Bible", "The Road", "Interview with the Vampire", "A Room with a View", "Replay", "Of Mice and Men", "Brave New World". The list of books that are gripping from the start, should they appeal to you, can be almost endless.

Basically, if you and your book align (ugh, sorry), then there generally shouldn't be any form of "volta" (really, ugh).

There are many novels that are boring to me. I've never finished those; I discard and move on to the next one, where the author knew how to write something that isn't boring to me. Someone else might love them, and many people clearly do, but they're not for me.

Why do so many people assume that everyone will love the exact same books, and that if you're bored by a book you just have to work at it some more? Life is too short for that nonsense.

There's the famous opening line to Neuromancer, "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." But I actually like the openings of Count Zero and Virtual Light more:

CZ: They sent a slamhound on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up with him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scrambling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT. He didn't see it coming.

The last he saw of India was the pink stucco facade of a place called the Khush-Oil Hotel. Because he had a good agent, he had a good contract. Because he had a good contract, he was in Singapore an hour after the explosion. Most of him, anyway The Dutch surgeon liked to joke about that, how an unspecified percentage of Turner hadn't made it out of Palam International on that first flight and had to spend the night there in a shed, in a support vat.

VL: The courier presses his forehead against layers of glass, argon, high-impact plastic. He watches a gunship traverse the city’s middle distance like a hunting wasp, death slung beneath its thorax in a smooth black pod.

IMO some writers are just better as short story writers, not novelists, but are forced into writing longer works by the publishing system.

Life's too short for novels that might get good halfway through, especially when there's plenty Austen I haven't read yet.

Is there a way to find out before investing so much time? Mainstream critics have different preferences than mine, my favorite works are all indie, but the people I find who like those also have different preferences. I read lots of plot summaries, but I think that has an opposite effect, ruining a novel that would interest me.

The first thing to accept is that different people like different things. If someone likes the Beatles, you wouldn't immediately jump to recommend Handel or Black Sabbath.

And, yet, this is EXACTLY what people do all the time with literature. Oh, you liked that Vonnegut story? Here, have some Dickens. ARGHGHGHGHGHG! NO! NO! NO! NO! Give the Vonnegut reader some O. Henry or Roald Dahl--not Dickens or Bronte. Good grief.

I got lucky. My father understood this. He always recommended things that he thought I would like--interspersed very rarely with things that were good for me that I might or might not like. But he NEVER gave me anything he thought I would dislike simply because it was supposedly "great literature".

And, now, Dear Readers, I leave you with wisdom for the ages imparted from Wallace Stevens via my father: "The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream."

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45234/the-emperor-of-...

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/309485-nobody-tells-this-to...

At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point. Every year during the month of March a family of ragged gypsies would set up their tents near the village, and with a great uproar of pipes and kettledrums they would..."

I remember reading the name of the rose by umber to eco, where I skimmed over the elaborate religious bits.

Yet, I wouldn't go so far as to say every novel is one. If you aren't an established author, publishers won't take on your manuscript if it doesn't hook them with the first chapter, better even with the first page.

That doesn't mean that a well written first chapter will hook everyone, though.

But also, it's extremely possible to write a novel that grabs you from the first page. Thriller writers are the most obvious case. A gripping concept or setting can do it, too. This author might think they're too cool for books like that, but we shouldn't keep them away from kids if that's what they want to read.

On the other hand, Blind Assassin was extremely boring to me until the very last page, but that last page blew my mind.

Eh... some novels remain boring no matter how far I read on.

The author is probably more sensitive to the Stockholm Syndrome and totally unaware of the Sunk Cost fallacy: for such readers, after investing their time, it's cognitive dissonance driving the interest factor.

Of course, even an initially very boring novel might become less boring as one reads on, but this is no argument in favor of it, as it applies to all novels.

However, there are novels that build up such a crescendo intentionally (like the novels by Anthony Trollope). Others maintain an evenness that holds stable throughout the novel (Daniel Defoe), whereas some others, fluctuate irrationally and wildly (Tolstoy).

Classifying all novel 'types' as the same is an elementary mistake.

It gets really interesting as you progress through the story.

I think this might be an indicator of adhd-ness. That these things grab me instantly because either I know something (usually) interesting is coming. The only PKD I've read that I've actively disliked was Timothy Archer which is comparatively tame, and nothing really comes of it compared to VALIS or Three Stigmata or Divine Invasion for example.

I've had other authors recommended based on this, but none of them really grip me the way they do. :( Maybe I just need to stick with it, like the author says - it eventually gets good. It's really hard these days as my attention span is worse than I was when I was even in my 20s (all those years ago).

We nicknamed "the Matrix Reloaded", the "Mattress Resprung", because for me it illustrated a major problem in films and books... The beginning and end are great but they sag in the middle like an old mattress.