I'd argue that the novels the TFA author reads are boring to the TFA author -- until they're not. If you are reading a novel that works for you, it's often not boring from the opening line.
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.
Not putting any action in the first 10% of my first novel was a big mistake, the reason is a lot of people these days "Read a Sample" and if they are not hooked then they just go to the next. Yes, the book may have ended with civilizations rising and falling but it started with a couple of uni students making a startup.
> “If you are bored with this novel after three pages, you shouldn’t read any further.”
The concept of DNF (“did not finish”) is pretty familiar to people who read regularly, but three pages seems far too early to make that call. The general rule of thumb I’ve encountered is closer to 100 - 150 pages.
Some of the most memorable works of literature I’ve read are books I didn’t particularly enjoy for the first hundred pages or more. I stuck with them mostly because I deliberately give books time to develop before deciding whether they’re for me.
My favorite example is A Tale of Two Cities. I didn’t enjoy it all that much until Book Three, Chapter 12. From there, it was smooth sailing. It’s now one of my favorite stories I’ve ever read, and I still think about it often, especially that entire final book.
That doesn’t mean every book takes that long for me. There are plenty I enjoy from the very beginning, particularly stories retold from a character’s perspective, adventure stories like Watership Down, and pretty much any Sherlock Holmes novel.
I understand the idea of putting a book down after a few pages if you don’t connect with it, and ultimately everyone should read however they want. But I do think that, by doing so, you risk missing out on some genuinely great books simply because they needed more time to become what made them worth reading.
Side note: My actual criteria for dropping a book are a little different. I tend to stop when reading it gives me a kind of vertigo or that strange feeling where your throat tightens and you start to feel sick.
> The general rule of thumb I’ve encountered is closer to 100 - 150 pages.
Practically all novels I've gotten to page 50 on I've finished. The only book I ever made it anywhere close to page 150 without getting anything back was The Fellowship of the Ring, and I think I got to page 200 before giving up (because I felt that I should be a person who liked The Lord of the Rings). It was a grueling experience. I can't fathom putting in 100 pages of joyless reading on a regular basis.
btw for people into science fiction and fantasy I highly recommend Ursula Vernon (writing as T Kingfisher) as someone who has me deeply invested almost from the get go. I mention it not just because I'm a fan, but because I consider that specific aspect as one of her greatest skills.
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 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.
Gibson is one of those writers who are much better prose stylists than plotters.
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.
I remember having to reread the first 4 pages of Pattern Recognition several times to actually understand the prose. Like the information density was so high I was having trouble parsing it. But kept me hooked anyway.
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.
There was a rule a fourth grade teacher of mine had that she used in her English class to try and get some of the less literate kids up to par. That rule was embodied by the name she gave it, "Thirty minutes thirty pages." She gave them thirty minutes to read thirty pages of a book. A minute a page. Considering most of them were choosing things like Goosebumps that were only a hundred and twenty pages or so it was an easy enough ask. But because she set it as a challenge so many of them went blasting beyond that. Many would finish half the book during that thirty minute reading period. The interesting thing I didn't pick up on until years later as an adult was that it was also slow enough that they could actually understand and remember what they were reading rather than just blasting through it. It left the slower readers with enough time and didn't make them feel like they were falling behind while encouraging them to learn how to read faster.
Many modern adult book series are six hundred pages or more for a single installment with about four hundred words a page versus the maybe hundred and fifty of a children's book like Goosebumps. Since it's three to four times the text that makes thirty pages thirty minutes actually viable as a self challenge even as an adult.
I consider myself a slow reader so I am interested in this pacing rule. Do you remember how the pacing was enforced? Were there like minute sandtimers or was it just kind of like a 30 minute timer and you either met the pace or didn't?
If the novel is any good, you'll continue reading despite not setting away time and it will also be worthwhile to read in every minute of spare time you can get.
Just finished up my second re-read of an unfinished book that kinda ruined most entertainment for me by setting the bar too high. I now have to make the difficult decision to either be disappointed by another novel or to just read this one yet again.
Usually I find it a bit tough to finish books and I never re-read anything in my life before for entertainment.
So if it is a bit tough, probably the book is just not good enough for you.
That's one part of it. The author needs to make it engaging as well so you get to flow state easier.
There is a good book "The science of storytelling" (Will Storr) which points out the techniques used by famous stories. Those techniques allow the reader to be more invested in the story.
Dungeon Crawler Carl for example uses some of the techniques (intentional or not).
> The key to enjoying novels is to read them in long enough sittings to get into the flow state
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.
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't make you want to cry, like listening in symphony hall might. If I had no other reason for learning English but to understand the prose of Austen, it'd still be worth it. And I'm just discovering the simple elegance of G.G. Márquez in Spanish. He does a similar trick in the first line of Cien años. "Había de recordar" is a future seen from the past, and Spanish carries it without strain. English has to choose between "was to remember" and "would remember", and both just miss it. The sentence sets up the whole book's time scheme in five words, and the beauty of it has to be contemplated.
Sometimes, reading a single passage from a book, I mean truly, deeply, honestly letting it sink into your subconsciousness makes up for all the insufficiencies in the story.
>it's like listening to Bach through the car stereo
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.
I'm not a musician, I suppose I should have picked a better analogy. Now I'm listening to Mahler and trying to find enlightenment. Thankfully, my desk audio setup is better than my car's.
>I feel enormously fortunate for being fluent in Russian, reading Bulgakov and Tolstoy in original is pure joy, any translation removes subtleties
As a native Russian speaker, I find it easier to experience their writings in English (and I don't feel anything of importance has been lost). And I've also heard other russian speakers claim that English prose (i.e. Shakespeare) is too dry, so I'm assuming this all comes entirely from people's subjective perceptions and is not an objective fact.
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.
For me there are novels with such big pay-offs that they are worth 100s of pages of setup to me. I usually only start them when I read online that they are worth it. I had this with Atlas Shrugged (500-600 pages of setup?).
Some are simply such a nice world (and indeed writing style) that they don’t even really need a Volta. I had that with the Commonwealth Saga by Hamilton. I just wanted it to go on and on (and it does for >2400 pages). (I was sadly disappointed by the follow-ups which are much less "sci"). Same with the Bobiverse books, eagerly awaiting part 6, although I still want to be in that world, it also feels like it should come to some beautiful end before dragging on too long...
One collary I'd add to this is that the opposite is also true. There have been plenty of times that I've trudged through the beginning of a novel, only to reach an "anti-volta" and realize that it isn't for me. It can incredibly frustrating and make the slog feel like a huge waste of time, but I still keep trying books. Maybe I'm just chasing the highs I felt when I first read the novels that got me into reading.
The problem with school children is most books that are assigned have no volta for them. Part of it is that modern storytelling has a much quicker volta through tv, movies, YouTube and now shorts. It’s hard to justify to a kid a 90 minute buildup to possible payoff vs getting it in five seconds for a 2 minute video.
The problem is, sometimes I pick up a novel and it doesn’t have that, it’s just boring through (or I think it will be so I give up).
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.
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 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."
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.
Well, the premise of the article is clearly stated. The headline is, of course, exaggerated, but why would you read the whole article when you disagree completely with the premise?
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.
The article focuses on novels, but of course many things in life are like this. Learning an instrument for example. It also brought to my mind that famous quote from Ira Glass about creative work.[1]
"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
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..."
Not ashamed to say that I love genre fiction and yes even comics with strong complex storylines. Sci-fi, mystery and supernatural (not purely horror) primarily and even middle grade fiction - both of these with little or absent fantasy/magic. That preference probably prejudices these voltas for me. I'm not sure if I'll ever read the so called great classics.
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.
I appreciate Isherwood in this retrospect. Most of this novels have a sort of placid flow about human existence and the tedium of modern life, until the last few pages retell the moral with such rapidity that feels almost physical.
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 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.
For years my youngest kid (10yo) showed no interest in reading. He would very sometimes try, but give up after a few pages.
But then he read a book that opened with the sentence “I thought I was being followed.”, and that was his gateway drug.
I fully credit the author, Maren Stoffels, for getting my boy into reading. Every book by her is exciting from the first page. If you’re Dutch and have kids, I warmly recommend “De Wisselaar”.
Furthermore - there are more than enough novels that grip you immediately, to spend your whole life reading them and avoiding the rest.
"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.
To be clear, I am in favor of giving books time to grab you. Long-term, this will give you more and deeper enjoyment. Some genuinely life-changing books really do need that time to get you up to speed. They're worth it.
Margaret Mitchell got me to read a thousand pages of Gone With The Wind because she placed a juicy hook in the first chapter (Ashley) which gave me the motivation to read the entire book to see what happens.
Why more novels do not have central hooks I do not know. Hooks are usually what keep me reading, unless the book has some kind of reason for being interesting otherwise.
Yeah same. I recently read the whole series to my son after he had begged me to stop after a couple of pages about 2 years ago. I told him: just keep your mind open for 100 pages.
The start is so cold, and weird. You can only feel the warmth and beauty that is coming on your second read, and part 1 takes some time to pay-off. What I like about Harry Potter is that many things are not what they seem when later looking back. It's clever like that.
On my own, 20 years ago, I couldn’t stop after starting. Sure the first chapters are a bit boring and different from the body of the books, but I have always given books about 100 pages to grab me, never consciously though about a Volta though, just almost always started to enjoy books after some time.
The follow-ups in a series can be enticing because of part one, but sometimes, as I had with 3 body problem, they disappoint so much or are so different that I just stop.
I've got the opposite problem with "Infinite Jest". I have had a hundred pages left for several years. I just need to sit down and soldier through those to say that I have read the bloody thing. It did not grip me.
Oh, for sure. It's phenomenally engaging. The main issue is that the first chapter is essentially a fly on the night sky, watching the events that happened on the day that Harry Potter's parents were murdered.
Super cool, but absolutely meaningless the first time you read the book because you don't know it yet.
I think chapters one—sorry, chapters two and three is mostly Harry getting his letter and the various hi-jinx that Uncle Vernon goes through to avoid the owls finding Harry at increasingly improbable addresses where somehow the owls still find Harry.
Then Hagrid shows up and explains to Harry that you are a wizard. And for 13-year-old me, that was off to the races.
Yep. A lot of thriller and mystery can get you on the first couple of pages. My now (probably all time) favorite book, Anathem by Neal Stephenson, took me three times to really get into. It started with a ton of exposition... and I guess the first few times I read it I didn't care too much for it. It was well worth the read though.
I disagree. Many novels have great openings. "The Horse's Mouth" by Joyce Cary had me from the opening paragraph. I could say the same about "Rebecca" by Daphne du Maurier or "the Crow Road" by Iain Banks.
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.
Thank you for being the only one to include the opening line of a book to pique my interest. And piqued it is. I have enjoyed The Wasp Factory (haven't read his scifi yet), and this sounds as exciting.
As a kid I'd often start reading books from about the middle, if I liked it, I'd restart from the beginning before I finished, if I didn't, I got another book.
Interesting article, thanks for sharing! Experiencing "a volta" is something I've felt often while reading, but it is always refreshing to see someone both have the awareness of this phenomenon and put a name to it.
I used to have a recurring problem with Doctor Who (the newer one / reboot) where some episodes would be so boring at first that I would not get through them. I had some success in trying to assure myself that EVERY episode at least had SOMETHING interesting, and in practice they did. I have been trying to adopt that idea more in life.
Oof, maybe don't. A lot of them are written directly for children, which they mostly work for, but only later bits have stuff mostly for adults and are vaguely worth analysing.
Don't what? I enjoy a lot of media written for children. Trollhunters / Tales of Arcadia, Miraculous Ladybug, Max Steel, My Little Pony (G4), Sonic Prime, etc. Though I tend to prefer media that respects intelligence rather than pure babyslop.
Max Steel in particular was so untargeted to adults that it's nearly lost media. I'm so glad for whoever managed to collect it and upload it to YouTube while it was still available.
Don't spend too much time on what was at the moment not meant for adults, like there is alot of other art to look at and interpret. It was more of a don't get crazy into it, my own Dad got super weird into interpreting things he thought he found in Doctor Who. It was both sad and weird. Just maybe don't dwell to much on things people didn't also give much thought to.
I think the existence of enough technical information for such an index to even be possible is what I mean by internal consistency. Not the absence of plot-holes or ret-cons.
Doctor Who is the opposite of Star Trek. It makes little attempt at internal consistency. It helps that time travel plays a large part in it. That said, it's been unwatchable for quite a while.
I call this process ‘threading the needle’ - some novels thread with ease, some do not thread with ease but the payoff is worth it in the end, some thread and then unthread, some never thread at all.
"But I suspect that the reason students are not reading novels is not only that they find novels difficult and boring. It is also that they don’t realize that novels are supposed to feel this way, at least at first."
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.
I hate that it seems the only authors I can really dig into fiction-wise is PKD and Douglas Adams. Something about their fast paced style, loose/weird tech, psychedelic, not too serious (well PKD still has some definite seriousness; but not expressed in a serious way).
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).
I'd argue that the novels the TFA author reads are boring to the TFA author -- until they're not. If you are reading a novel that works for you, it's often not boring from the opening line.
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.
Not putting any action in the first 10% of my first novel was a big mistake, the reason is a lot of people these days "Read a Sample" and if they are not hooked then they just go to the next. Yes, the book may have ended with civilizations rising and falling but it started with a couple of uni students making a startup.
> “If you are bored with this novel after three pages, you shouldn’t read any further.”
The concept of DNF (“did not finish”) is pretty familiar to people who read regularly, but three pages seems far too early to make that call. The general rule of thumb I’ve encountered is closer to 100 - 150 pages.
Some of the most memorable works of literature I’ve read are books I didn’t particularly enjoy for the first hundred pages or more. I stuck with them mostly because I deliberately give books time to develop before deciding whether they’re for me.
My favorite example is A Tale of Two Cities. I didn’t enjoy it all that much until Book Three, Chapter 12. From there, it was smooth sailing. It’s now one of my favorite stories I’ve ever read, and I still think about it often, especially that entire final book.
That doesn’t mean every book takes that long for me. There are plenty I enjoy from the very beginning, particularly stories retold from a character’s perspective, adventure stories like Watership Down, and pretty much any Sherlock Holmes novel.
I understand the idea of putting a book down after a few pages if you don’t connect with it, and ultimately everyone should read however they want. But I do think that, by doing so, you risk missing out on some genuinely great books simply because they needed more time to become what made them worth reading.
Side note: My actual criteria for dropping a book are a little different. I tend to stop when reading it gives me a kind of vertigo or that strange feeling where your throat tightens and you start to feel sick.
> The general rule of thumb I’ve encountered is closer to 100 - 150 pages.
Practically all novels I've gotten to page 50 on I've finished. The only book I ever made it anywhere close to page 150 without getting anything back was The Fellowship of the Ring, and I think I got to page 200 before giving up (because I felt that I should be a person who liked The Lord of the Rings). It was a grueling experience. I can't fathom putting in 100 pages of joyless reading on a regular basis.
>but three pages seems far too early to make that call.
I have a large DNF pile and most of them I could have called at 3 pages but hung on way too long.
If it isn't one of the greatest books you've ever read, stop reading it.
btw for people into science fiction and fantasy I highly recommend Ursula Vernon (writing as T Kingfisher) as someone who has me deeply invested almost from the get go. I mention it not just because I'm a fan, but because I consider that specific aspect as one of her greatest skills.
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 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.
Gibson is one of those writers who are much better prose stylists than plotters.
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.
Yeah it does seem like he picked his story structure in 1984 and decided, “well, that’s done, now on to the interesting parts.”
> short story writers
esp. among sci-fi, as sci-fi is more about concept than execution,
I remember having to reread the first 4 pages of Pattern Recognition several times to actually understand the prose. Like the information density was so high I was having trouble parsing it. But kept me hooked anyway.
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.
There was a rule a fourth grade teacher of mine had that she used in her English class to try and get some of the less literate kids up to par. That rule was embodied by the name she gave it, "Thirty minutes thirty pages." She gave them thirty minutes to read thirty pages of a book. A minute a page. Considering most of them were choosing things like Goosebumps that were only a hundred and twenty pages or so it was an easy enough ask. But because she set it as a challenge so many of them went blasting beyond that. Many would finish half the book during that thirty minute reading period. The interesting thing I didn't pick up on until years later as an adult was that it was also slow enough that they could actually understand and remember what they were reading rather than just blasting through it. It left the slower readers with enough time and didn't make them feel like they were falling behind while encouraging them to learn how to read faster.
Many modern adult book series are six hundred pages or more for a single installment with about four hundred words a page versus the maybe hundred and fifty of a children's book like Goosebumps. Since it's three to four times the text that makes thirty pages thirty minutes actually viable as a self challenge even as an adult.
I consider myself a slow reader so I am interested in this pacing rule. Do you remember how the pacing was enforced? Were there like minute sandtimers or was it just kind of like a 30 minute timer and you either met the pace or didn't?
If the novel is any good, you'll continue reading despite not setting away time and it will also be worthwhile to read in every minute of spare time you can get.
Just finished up my second re-read of an unfinished book that kinda ruined most entertainment for me by setting the bar too high. I now have to make the difficult decision to either be disappointed by another novel or to just read this one yet again.
Usually I find it a bit tough to finish books and I never re-read anything in my life before for entertainment.
So if it is a bit tough, probably the book is just not good enough for you.
Don't leave us hanging, brother! What's the book?
Not necessarily something everyone enjoys as much as I did. But I wish everyone to find a book that he enjoys as much as I did:
https://www.webnovel.com/book/reverend-insanity_799685840600...
That's one part of it. The author needs to make it engaging as well so you get to flow state easier.
There is a good book "The science of storytelling" (Will Storr) which points out the techniques used by famous stories. Those techniques allow the reader to be more invested in the story.
Dungeon Crawler Carl for example uses some of the techniques (intentional or not).
Reading in 5 min bursts in-between longer sessions can remain a valid strategy, but you have to carry the book with you everywhere for it to work out.
> The key to enjoying novels is to read them in long enough sittings to get into the flow state
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.
Flow is a state of privilege, too, yet (thru reading) one most easily cultivated. Take control of your time expenditure!
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't make you want to cry, like listening in symphony hall might. If I had no other reason for learning English but to understand the prose of Austen, it'd still be worth it. And I'm just discovering the simple elegance of G.G. Márquez in Spanish. He does a similar trick in the first line of Cien años. "Había de recordar" is a future seen from the past, and Spanish carries it without strain. English has to choose between "was to remember" and "would remember", and both just miss it. The sentence sets up the whole book's time scheme in five words, and the beauty of it has to be contemplated.
Sometimes, reading a single passage from a book, I mean truly, deeply, honestly letting it sink into your subconsciousness makes up for all the insufficiencies in the story.
>it's like listening to Bach through the car stereo
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.
I'm not a musician, I suppose I should have picked a better analogy. Now I'm listening to Mahler and trying to find enlightenment. Thankfully, my desk audio setup is better than my car's.
>I feel enormously fortunate for being fluent in Russian, reading Bulgakov and Tolstoy in original is pure joy, any translation removes subtleties
As a native Russian speaker, I find it easier to experience their writings in English (and I don't feel anything of importance has been lost). And I've also heard other russian speakers claim that English prose (i.e. Shakespeare) is too dry, so I'm assuming this all comes entirely from people's subjective perceptions and is not an objective fact.
> easier to experience their writings in English
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.
For me there are novels with such big pay-offs that they are worth 100s of pages of setup to me. I usually only start them when I read online that they are worth it. I had this with Atlas Shrugged (500-600 pages of setup?).
Some are simply such a nice world (and indeed writing style) that they don’t even really need a Volta. I had that with the Commonwealth Saga by Hamilton. I just wanted it to go on and on (and it does for >2400 pages). (I was sadly disappointed by the follow-ups which are much less "sci"). Same with the Bobiverse books, eagerly awaiting part 6, although I still want to be in that world, it also feels like it should come to some beautiful end before dragging on too long...
One collary I'd add to this is that the opposite is also true. There have been plenty of times that I've trudged through the beginning of a novel, only to reach an "anti-volta" and realize that it isn't for me. It can incredibly frustrating and make the slog feel like a huge waste of time, but I still keep trying books. Maybe I'm just chasing the highs I felt when I first read the novels that got me into reading.
The problem with school children is most books that are assigned have no volta for them. Part of it is that modern storytelling has a much quicker volta through tv, movies, YouTube and now shorts. It’s hard to justify to a kid a 90 minute buildup to possible payoff vs getting it in five seconds for a 2 minute video.
The problem is, sometimes I pick up a novel and it doesn’t have that, it’s just boring through (or I think it will be so I give up).
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.
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 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-...
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.
Well, the premise of the article is clearly stated. The headline is, of course, exaggerated, but why would you read the whole article when you disagree completely with the premise?
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.
One can read the entire article AND disagree with the fundamental premise.
Reading should not feel like wading through slop. Period. If it does, that is simply bad writing.
Too many people don't have the guts to simply say "No, I do not like that; there are better things I can read."
The article focuses on novels, but of course many things in life are like this. Learning an instrument for example. It also brought to my mind that famous quote from Ira Glass about creative work.[1]
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/309485-nobody-tells-this-to...
"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
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..."
Not ashamed to say that I love genre fiction and yes even comics with strong complex storylines. Sci-fi, mystery and supernatural (not purely horror) primarily and even middle grade fiction - both of these with little or absent fantasy/magic. That preference probably prejudices these voltas for me. I'm not sure if I'll ever read the so called great classics.
I remember reading the name of the rose by umber to eco, where I skimmed over the elaborate religious bits.
Yeah, there are plenty of slow burns.
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.
I appreciate Isherwood in this retrospect. Most of this novels have a sort of placid flow about human existence and the tedium of modern life, until the last few pages retell the moral with such rapidity that feels almost physical.
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 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.
For years my youngest kid (10yo) showed no interest in reading. He would very sometimes try, but give up after a few pages.
But then he read a book that opened with the sentence “I thought I was being followed.”, and that was his gateway drug.
I fully credit the author, Maren Stoffels, for getting my boy into reading. Every book by her is exciting from the first page. If you’re Dutch and have kids, I warmly recommend “De Wisselaar”.
Furthermore - there are more than enough novels that grip you immediately, to spend your whole life reading them and avoiding the rest.
"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.
To be clear, I am in favor of giving books time to grab you. Long-term, this will give you more and deeper enjoyment. Some genuinely life-changing books really do need that time to get you up to speed. They're worth it.
Margaret Mitchell got me to read a thousand pages of Gone With The Wind because she placed a juicy hook in the first chapter (Ashley) which gave me the motivation to read the entire book to see what happens.
Why more novels do not have central hooks I do not know. Hooks are usually what keep me reading, unless the book has some kind of reason for being interesting otherwise.
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.
Yeah same. I recently read the whole series to my son after he had begged me to stop after a couple of pages about 2 years ago. I told him: just keep your mind open for 100 pages.
The start is so cold, and weird. You can only feel the warmth and beauty that is coming on your second read, and part 1 takes some time to pay-off. What I like about Harry Potter is that many things are not what they seem when later looking back. It's clever like that.
On my own, 20 years ago, I couldn’t stop after starting. Sure the first chapters are a bit boring and different from the body of the books, but I have always given books about 100 pages to grab me, never consciously though about a Volta though, just almost always started to enjoy books after some time.
The follow-ups in a series can be enticing because of part one, but sometimes, as I had with 3 body problem, they disappoint so much or are so different that I just stop.
I've got the opposite problem with "Infinite Jest". I have had a hundred pages left for several years. I just need to sit down and soldier through those to say that I have read the bloody thing. It did not grip me.
I’ve had that as well haha. I have read many books for about 50%. I try not to feel guilty about it. Glass half full, right?
I started as a kid with the second book, as it was the only one in the bookstore on that day
Really? I thought the first Harry Potter book was very engaging. The second book had more dry spots for me.
Oh, for sure. It's phenomenally engaging. The main issue is that the first chapter is essentially a fly on the night sky, watching the events that happened on the day that Harry Potter's parents were murdered.
Super cool, but absolutely meaningless the first time you read the book because you don't know it yet.
I think chapters one—sorry, chapters two and three is mostly Harry getting his letter and the various hi-jinx that Uncle Vernon goes through to avoid the owls finding Harry at increasingly improbable addresses where somehow the owls still find Harry.
Then Hagrid shows up and explains to Harry that you are a wizard. And for 13-year-old me, that was off to the races.
isn't the first chapter like 10 pages?
Yep. A lot of thriller and mystery can get you on the first couple of pages. My now (probably all time) favorite book, Anathem by Neal Stephenson, took me three times to really get into. It started with a ton of exposition... and I guess the first few times I read it I didn't care too much for it. It was well worth the read though.
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I disagree. Many novels have great openings. "The Horse's Mouth" by Joyce Cary had me from the opening paragraph. I could say the same about "Rebecca" by Daphne du Maurier or "the Crow Road" by Iain Banks.
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.
> It was the day my grandmother exploded.
Probably Banks's most memorable opening line. Love Crow Road... Have you seen the tv adaptation? I keep meaning to watch it.
Thank you for being the only one to include the opening line of a book to pique my interest. And piqued it is. I have enjoyed The Wasp Factory (haven't read his scifi yet), and this sounds as exciting.
I should really give Consider Phlebas another go.
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.
The Blind Assassin is possibly one of the best novels of all time.
DCC is, well, not that.
As a kid I'd often start reading books from about the middle, if I liked it, I'd restart from the beginning before I finished, if I didn't, I got another book.
well everyone has their own choices. personally, I do not find novels to be boring.
It gets really interesting as you progress through the story.
Interesting article, thanks for sharing! Experiencing "a volta" is something I've felt often while reading, but it is always refreshing to see someone both have the awareness of this phenomenon and put a name to it.
I used to have a recurring problem with Doctor Who (the newer one / reboot) where some episodes would be so boring at first that I would not get through them. I had some success in trying to assure myself that EVERY episode at least had SOMETHING interesting, and in practice they did. I have been trying to adopt that idea more in life.
Oof, maybe don't. A lot of them are written directly for children, which they mostly work for, but only later bits have stuff mostly for adults and are vaguely worth analysing.
Don't what? I enjoy a lot of media written for children. Trollhunters / Tales of Arcadia, Miraculous Ladybug, Max Steel, My Little Pony (G4), Sonic Prime, etc. Though I tend to prefer media that respects intelligence rather than pure babyslop.
Max Steel in particular was so untargeted to adults that it's nearly lost media. I'm so glad for whoever managed to collect it and upload it to YouTube while it was still available.
Don't spend too much time on what was at the moment not meant for adults, like there is alot of other art to look at and interpret. It was more of a don't get crazy into it, my own Dad got super weird into interpreting things he thought he found in Doctor Who. It was both sad and weird. Just maybe don't dwell to much on things people didn't also give much thought to.
Not crazy into it, just generally appreciative of media with internally-consistent science or magic.
Doctor Who is definitely the last thing I would dub as "internally-consistent". It's a serial--and the duct taped seams show--sometimes glaringly so.
But, every now and then, the writing CLICKS and you get genuine emotional ART--generally as a monologue.
I will admit a fair bit of enjoyment comes from the TARDIS Technical Index: https://whoniverse.net/tardis
I think the existence of enough technical information for such an index to even be possible is what I mean by internal consistency. Not the absence of plot-holes or ret-cons.
A lot of shows simply aren't very technical.
Doctor Who is the opposite of Star Trek. It makes little attempt at internal consistency. It helps that time travel plays a large part in it. That said, it's been unwatchable for quite a while.
The beginning of The Count of Monte Cristo was extremely boring, but gets so good once you get past it.
I call this process ‘threading the needle’ - some novels thread with ease, some do not thread with ease but the payoff is worth it in the end, some thread and then unthread, some never thread at all.
"But I suspect that the reason students are not reading novels is not only that they find novels difficult and boring. It is also that they don’t realize that novels are supposed to feel this way, at least at first."
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.
I hate that it seems the only authors I can really dig into fiction-wise is PKD and Douglas Adams. Something about their fast paced style, loose/weird tech, psychedelic, not too serious (well PKD still has some definite seriousness; but not expressed in a serious way).
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).
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