Quote:
Originally Posted by neilmarr
An author who can't impress you with his/her story, characters or style in a first chapter doesn't deserve your attention for a second chapter. Reading time's too precious to waste. It's the author's job to interest you, not your chore to complete what an author wants to put your way. I'd rather throw away or delete a book after a few disappointing pages than see it as some kind of marathon challenge that takes up valuable time that could be better spent on a more deserving work. Good authors with worthwhile offerings will grab you within five hundred words and hold you spellbound right the way to an unwelcome *The End*. Neil
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Many years ago, I was given a copy of J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the rings" trilogy by an English teacher. I started reading _The Fellowship of the Rings_. I began with
"When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton."
It stopped me dead for a minute. I'd been reading SF for years, but this was something else. I had to push myself through aboyut the first 100 pages before the work kicked in. After that, I read the trilogy in a weekend, and have re-read it an average of one a year since.
Years later, I encountered E. R. Eddison's _The Worm Ouroboros_, in a Ballantine PB edition. Introduced to fantasy by Tolkien, I'd been reading broadly in the genre, looking for things that weren't simply quest tales. I encountered
"THERE was a man named Lessingham dwelt in an old low house in Wasdale, set in a gray old garden where yew-trees flourished that had seen Vikings in Copeland in their seedling time."
This was quite another matter. Eddison was a Victorian gentleman that wrote Elizabethan prose. I bounced off, till I learned to relax and let the book read itself to me, rather than actively read it myself. Once the taste was acquired, the prose went down like fine cognac, and I understood why Ursula K. Le Guin should single out Eddison's work in her volume of essays
The language of the night: essays on fantasy and science fiction
If I'd followed your dictum, I'd have passed on both of these, for not grabbing me from the first few pages.
I could probably come up with other examples, and I'm sure others here could as well. While I concur that it's an author's job to interest me, it's my job to keep an open mind, free as I can of preconceptions about what I might find of interest, and stay aware that unfamiliar style, structure, or subject does not equate to bad book.
It may in fact be a bad book, for reasons I can technically analyze. It may be a decent book that just doesn't do it for me. It may be a book I'm not in the mood for then, but may pick up at another time and read with pleasure. Regardless, a chapter is likely not sufficient evidence one way or the other.
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Dennis