Rebecca over at Dirty Sexy Books brought up the topic of slow starts in novels and whether or not authors are doing themselves a disservice by not hooking the reader quickly. That some readers won't persevere because this modern age of instant gratification means that unless their attention is grabbed from the outset, they move on to the next one.
I can see why some would think the rise and rise of the internet (contrary to what Prince thinks) has certainly changed the way we think and how we live our lives, but I think there is more to it than that.
In the last 12 months, I only have one DNF and that was Christine Feehan’s ‘The Dark Prince’. I have it to page 60. Or was it 80? Anyway, I just could not gel with the characters – she said no, but he went for her anyway and then she was all into him? Maybe I missed something in all the head hopping, I don’t know, but I certainly thought it was a waste of time and money. The story and the writing style just weren’t my cup of tea.
Between ‘Wuthering Heights’ and Austen’s ‘Persuasion’ (the latter I had to read for school) I learned early that perservering with a book I don’t like is silly, especially if it just to say I’ve read/finished it and that understanding came well before the internet as we know it. There’s a whole world of good stuff out there for me to read and, since all of my efforts to live forever have so far come to naught, I won’t sweat the bad stuff. To quote Rebecca: "There are too many good books out there to waste my time on mediocrity.”
A commenter on Rebecca's site said that a slow start is a completely different animal to a boring one and I completely agree. I need something to keep me engaged with the novel, if it’s a slow start. Whether it’s the characters, the language used, I just need something.
‘Lonely Werewolf Girl’ by Martin Millar was one of those. I loved the simplistic language he employed to tell the story of a laudenum-addicted, anorexic, self-harming werewolf. And then he introduced a cast of characters that were all so rich in their individualism, still using the simplistic language. It’s a tome of nearly 600 pages, it took me a while to read it and the middle lagged a bit, but I really enjoyed it. I have, however, read reviews to the contrary, so to each their own.
Like others who commented on the post, the ‘classics’ get a little more leeway, because it can take me a while to get into the language, even sometimes something as simple as sentence structure can take some getting use to. But I won’t read them if there are no redeeming qualities. Gulliver’s Travels and Emma are two more examples of classics that I did not finish – Gulliver’s Travels because it was just too hard to read a book when one paragraph can take a whole page or more and Emma was far, far too annoying for me to not want to slap her before I threw the book across the room.
I don’t read too many classics because of the aforementioned reason – getting my head around the language can be difficult, depending on the book of course. (Pride and Prejudice transcends all language barriers as far as I’m concerned!)
I think that the biggest issue though, when it comes to how long people will cope with a book that doesn’t hook them from the start, is time. In this day and age of opportunity, we’re supposed to do more, to be more, to have more. What we have lost, though, is the time to do it all. I read or heard somewhere that modern day people receive more information an a week than people 100 years ago did in their entire lifetime. While that is a good thing in some respects, in others, it can be really overwhelming.
This is why I think a lot of people are more inclined to ‘vege in front of the tele’ (which is something I do!) rather than vege with a good book. To read implies you have to use your brain, and to a certain extent yes, it probably does need to be more engaged than when you watch TV simply because you have to imagine the scene, rather than have it given to you. I think a lot of non-readers don’t realise that you can get book fodder, the paper equivalent of a mindless action flick if you will. To these people, I guess, reading is seen as a literary ideal. Not necessarily a high-falutin’ exercise done only by smart people, just that reading is using your brain and sometimes they just don’t wanna.
And in our time-poor society, sometimes we need that hook, that thing that keeps us reading because without it we don’t think we can justify the time spent reading when time itself is so precious.
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