Every novel is boring until it isn't

I suppose, it may feel easier, because English can be dense, it can feel more compact. Of course, it has this chameleonic ability to implode into scholarly dry, sophisticated and complex language, but yes, when I need more informational throughput, English usually outshines other alternatives - it delivers the point from the page directly into your brain. Although with prose, often it's not the sheer throughput but small subtleties that matter - we read not just for the sake of the fast comprehension of the story. How would you paint the difference between 'сухарь' and 'сухарик' in Russian text, especially if the words are used metaphorically? Of course it is all very subjective - I can only imagine what emotions evoke the arrangement of words I choose to put in this text - they could make you angry or sad, or bring smile or utter indifference. I've read Bulgakov in four different languages, and yet translations never matched pictures the original elicits in my head. "В белом плаще с кровавым подбоем, шаркающей кавалерийской походкой, ранним утром четырнадцатого числа весеннего месяца нисана ..." simply can't be done in another language for me - it just never feels the same.

Shakespeare is dry in English and feels easier in Russian translation because there's such a thing as "archaic English". The Russian language, in comparison, has changed little over the past few hundred years.

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 enjoy reading his prose immensely, but he's been stamping out books with the same template for ever: an expert is hired to do something. Turns out there's a man with unlimited cash flow funding everything, but was hiding his true intentions (usually in order to lay a trap), which are revealed, and then some McGuffin is saved or eliminated or whatever; meanwhile, the main character mostly didn't do anything, just a passive spectator to some plot unfolding around them. The one I will forgive most easily here is Count Zero, which I think is much better than its reputation (except for the Haitian voodoo deity stuff, which didn't land for me); while the template is the same, the ruse connects well with Neuromancer, and it's just a fun, action-filled book that is definitely not boring. (The ruse in The Peripheral, by comparison, was deeply unsatisfying. Agency was junk, most of the book describing preparations for a military attack while the main character sleeps. Even the prose was much worse and much sloppier than usual.)

What's interesting is that his early short stories are much more original, I think. Burning Chrome, New Rose Hotel, and Johnny Mnemonic, for example, show flashes of originality that maybe Gibson wasn't able to keep up when plotting out whole novels.