I always say to myself that it is not worth to force books through. I do like 1/5th then I drop it if it did not catch me. Now I’m reading Pandora’s star which is a great scifi book and sandwitched inbetween the great scfi chapters there is this uninteresting detective storyline with zero scifi, people talking to eachother about uninteresting stuff. I found myself forcing the book and questioned multiple times if I should continue. Then again a great chapter comes with interesting stuff I get hooked and within an eyeglance I’m back into this people talking each other for 30 pages. I will decide if I keep going or not, maybe I try to force it throgh the base storyline is keeping me hooked. Did you had any similar experience? What did you do?
Drop it. There are other 1 trillion books out there waiting for you that are worth your time, not like this one.
Have you read it? I agree with OP that the first half is utterly hard to get through, but the second half definitely makes up for it.
No (never heard of it). I’m answering to the question “What do you do when a great book has an absolutely uninteresting storyline?”, not about this specific book.
If a book has an “absolutely uninteresting storyline”, then it’s not that “great” to me, so I drop it and get another one.
Agreed! Life’s too short to read uninteresting books.
I tend to set things down if it’s not working for me at the moment, because sometimes later I’ll come back to it and it will. But in this case, where it’s part not the whole you’re struggling with, maybe you just need to know what the point of the bits you find uninteresting is? The writer will have included all of it for a reason.
Pandora’s Star all ties together, give it time. The second book is great too. I’ve read them both like a dozen times!
I skip chapters. Game of Thrones was a tough one to power through because I hated most of the characters.
After the first book, I only read the Jon and Arya chapters, nothing else was interesting. When I hit the aftermath of the Red Wedding I had to backtrack and read Rob’s chapter going “Man, glad I wasn’t invested in him, that would have sucked!”
Under the Dome had a similar problem with large sections focused on the cardboard character villains so I started skipping the bits with them. I wanted to see how Barbie and the gang were working things out.
For this specific case (Pandoras Star) I urge you to push through. It took me half a year to finish it because it’s so much stuff that’s just boring in the first half of the book, but the later part of it definitely makes up for it. I’m reading Judas Unchained now even though I promised myself not to pick up a beast (800+ pages) for a good while.