What makes me continue or stop reading a book

At what point do you decide to continue reading a book or to stop and move on to the next one?

I’ve heard people say they will give a book 50 pages or a chapter to convince them to continue reading.  I give a book about a page or two. Sometimes I will extend that if there is a prologue. But, you might say, that’s not enough time to know if you will like the book.

True. But it is enough time for me to know if I will like the author’s writing. As I have gotten older, that has become the most important thing in my deciding to continue reading a book. Writing style, at least in popular fiction and most literature, does not change over the course of a book. The voice of the author (or the narrator if it is first person) is what keeps me reading.

Obviously, I am not completely a stylist. I value character, theme, and plot as much as most people. It’s just that storytelling is an art. For me, the way a story is told is almost more important than the story itself. History shows this. The stories that last are the ones well told.

Let’s look at some examples.

            Catch-22: I laughed so hard reading the first pages that I didn’t care if the plot confused me later on or I didn’t connect to the characters. The writing was so fun I read it to the end.

            No Country for Old Men: Couldn’t stand the sparse narration. Just didn’t work here with this story. Now, for some reason, it works in The Road. The lack of quotation marks has the same effect.

            American Pastoral: Big important book. Big pretentious writing.

The oddities:

            The Anita Blake series: I wanted to like this series, but it was so overwritten that I couldn’t enjoy it. I don’t need that much description, especially when it is pointless. However, it took me a bit longer than normal to realize it was like this.

            Atonement: Similar to No Country in that I’m not sure what is going on. Somehow I finished it. Considering the story, that might have been part of the idea. Not that I could figure that out from the writing. McEwen’s On Chesil Beach is better. The short elegance works better to that story.

It’s ironic in some ways that I feel the opposite about movies. Within limited exceptions the style of a movie will not dictate whether I will watch it or not. The two main exceptions: A Tony Scott (RIP) heavily edited stylized kind of movie and a visually transporting spectacle (Avatar, Gravity). The former I can’t watch no matter the quality of the story and characters. The latter I will watch despite the lacking story and character.

But that is a thought for another day.