31–40 of 80 posts
If you want to tell reading-skeptical kids about "the volta", please don't phrase it as "the volta". Just say that a lot of good novels need you to read them for a bit to see what's going on, and then it will get good. They might already be familiar with the idea from TV shows. 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…
If you want to tell reading-skeptical kids about "the volta", please don't phrase it as "the volta". Just say that a lot of good novels need you to read them for a bit to see what's going on, and then it will get good. They might already be familiar with the idea from TV shows. 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…
"The rest" tend to come in two categories. Books I lack some experience for to be gripped by - which I may come back to in future. And bad books - which I will not. YOLO.
No, NOT every novel is boring from the get go. And some novels ARE boring. And the fact that so many people recommend the ones that are is the bloody problem. 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…
You did not read the article completely, did you? For someone with wise father, you are not being wise yourself. The writer is exactly talking about this subjectivity.
I also find "the volta" unrelatable. I don't feel that every novel is boring at the beginning, nor do I experience boredom between the "portal" and the "volta". Some novels have parts I find boring, of course, but they can appear at any part of a book for me.
I guess that this phenomenon is more rooted in the way the author and her peer group read. Reading dozens or hundreds of novels a year, often for a professional purpose, is wholly different from me reading my one or two books a month. I guess, if I had to read a whole bunch of novels for my PhD, I would be bored more during reading.
I recently read Dungeon Crawler Carl. It’s pretty much interesting from the very beginning. On the other hand, Blind Assassin was extremely boring to me until the very last page, but that last page blew my mind.
DCC is, well, not that.
The key to enjoying novels is to read them in long enough sittings to get into the flow state. If you only read a couple pages at a time between doomscrolling sessions, it will feel like a chore. Anything would.
As a voracious reader, I both agree and disagree with this.
There are some books that simply take too long to come to the point. I'm reading an ARC of a dark academia that's highly rated. I'm 60% in and I haven't yet gotten interested in it. I read entire "Billy Summers" in 2 days by halting the previous book's read. So yeah, the onus is also on the author to make the book interesting
Full disclosure: I am not a tiktok or reel addict. I've read 65 books last year, currently on my 45th book of 2026. I love long books.
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.
William Gibson is one of my favorite writers, and it's funny because I think he has the exact opposite problem. Most of his novels open on the action, in some interesting location. But gradually they get weaker, with a few (Mona Lisa Overdrive, in my case) becoming a real slog to finish. I've probably read the first 50 pages of Neuromancer 20 times, but only the entire novel 3-4 times in 20+ years. There's the famous…
esp. among sci-fi, as sci-fi is more about concept than execution,
If you want to tell reading-skeptical kids about "the volta", please don't phrase it as "the volta". Just say that a lot of good novels need you to read them for a bit to see what's going on, and then it will get good. They might already be familiar with the idea from TV shows. 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…
It took me more than a week to go through the first chapter in the first Harry Potter book. It took me 4 days to finish the rest. This is because the pacing was wrong - the first chapter should have been the last.
I value writing style and pacing way more than any volta. Pride and Prejudice is hardly my genre, yet I remembered it grabbing me immediately. So just now I checked to see if I remembered it correctly, and within the first minute I laughed and I'm hooked again. Life's too short for novels that might get good halfway through, especially when there's plenty Austen I haven't read yet.
Yes! The opening line of Pride and Prejudice alone is already immediately captivating. And then makes you re-read it again, after you finish the book and it suddenly shines differently. I feel enormously fortunate for being fluent in Russian, reading Bulgakov and Tolstoy in original is pure joy, any translation removes subtleties - it's like listening to Bach through the car stereo, you still can enjoy it, but it won…
Bach sounds great even as chiptunes. The artistic value is mostly in the harmonic development, not the timbre, so sound quality isn't so important. The organ works will suffer a bit without a big subwoofer, but you can get that in a car. Bach composed a lot of his works on a clavichord.
A better example would be a composer like Mahler.