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Sleepers and Keepers
Sometimes I pick up a book and the first chapter or two are a struggle. Maybe there’s a prologue or some backstory that makes for a slower pace. Then, after I’ve struggled along with it for a while because this book had great reviews or my friend said I really should read it, I persevere.
Suddenly, I notice the time and I can’t put this book down. Somehow it’s gone from being a potential wall-banger to a must-read. There are a few books I can think of that have been like that for me. Usually they’re longer length or a genre I don’t read so often.
This made me think then about how many of these books do I have on my keeper shelf? When I checked, I found just under a third of my keepers were these slow-burners. Books that didn’t get me straight away but that by the middle I was hooked. Would I then read them again knowing that the beginning was at a different pace than the other books that I liked? Plus, would they read differently, second time around?
When I thought about I realised they had read differently when I’d read them again. So, my question is do you have books like that on your keeper shelf? Do you reread them? And how far into a book will you read before you decide if it’s a sleeper or a wall-banger?
I have several books on my keeper shelf, but there are only a handful that I return to over and over.
Hi Michelle, I have some books that I love to reread. Were the ones you love books that grabbed you straight away or or were they sleepers?
I’ve got LOADS of books that I didn’t get hooked on until about midway through. Saying that – if I’m NOT hooked by then, I usually put it aside and pick up something else.
I’m having trouble, right now, getting into George Eliot’s Middlemarch. It’s my sisters favourite book, and since we have very similar reading taste I assume that I would like it….if ONLY I could get past all the dull community politics….and the first…oh….four hundred pages or so…..sigh.
I recall trying to read Les Miserables. The story is great — if only you can get to it. I never did. I chucked the book when I realized that the first mention of the hero, Jean Valjean, was on page 176. Umm, that’s beyond a slow burn. Oh well. The musical was great!
Jane Eyre starts slowly and I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve read it. To Kill a Mockingbird doesn’t really start in the action, either, but it’s at the top of my list. Most of my keeper romances, however, are quick starters.
I’m bad. I start Jane Eyre at chapter 10, just as she’s about to advertise for a position. I’ve never liked the death of Helen and Lowood School, so I skip it.
I am not a patient reader. I give every book 50 pages to grab me. If I can’t find a character to love, a question to wonder about, or an action sequence to pull me along, I’m gone. I wish I could be literary and claim a love for “classics” like many of you, but I’m not a fan. I read to be entertained and the slow pace of most of the books I had to read in high school nearly turned me off reading all together. (Anyone else ready to gauge their own eyeballs out if that damn turtle took even one more sentence to cross the road in Grapes of Wrath?) I’ll take “A Thousand Splendid Suns” or “Like Water for Elephants” over Silas Marner any day! So my “keeper” shelf is generally filled with best sellers, rich with metaphor and clever turns of phrase.
Hi Rebecca, I think older books generally have a slower pace. But George Elliot was never one of my favorites.
Sela, good choices with To Kill a Mocking Bird and Jane Eyre. One of mine that took me a bit to get into was Lorna Doone.
Hi Kim, I don’t like those bits but they’ve stuck in my mind so they must have done the trick for what the author intended.
Kerri, I think the books most of us were forced to read in High school put a lot of people off classics for life. I personally can’t stand Shakespeare as we did the gloomiest most depressing plays – King Lear, anyone?
Oh yes. Dorothy Dunnett’s King Hereafter was like that for me. Very slow in the beginning with a hero I wasn’t all that fond of. I almost put the book down. However, it was recommended by a friend whose reading preferences were similar to mine, so I persevered. So glad I did. I read that monstrosity over a three-day time period almost non-stop. I took it to work with me, read during lunch, read at stoplights, read during dinner, woke up early to read more before getting ready for work. By the time I came to the end, I was utterly blown away by the book. It remains my absolute favorite novel to this day. I’ve read it twice more, and it does read differently, but I think that comes from knowing what to expect.
Hi Grace, that’s exactly the kind of experience I meant.
If I’m not into a book by the third chapter, I’ll probably never finish it. I need to be hooked right away.
Me too usually, Jerri but sometimes if the books been recomended then I’ll keep going for a bit longer.
We want a faster-paced book these days. Most books published before 1950 seem to start slower. I loved Sho-Gun, but couldn’t get through the first chapter of Taipan, which introduced about fifty characters. And The Last of the Mohicans. Do you know of anyone who made it past page 17 in that book?
Laura Kinsale’s Flowers from the Storm didn’t hook me at first because the first chapter seems totally divorced from the plot. Yet I’ve read it seven times, and my entire writing career has been influenced by this book.
Flowers from the storm is a good book, but I agree, Delle it’s definitely a sleeper.
I’ll give a book to about page 50 or so. If I don’t care about the characters by that point or am not interested in the story I probably never will be.
That said, there are very few books that I’ve started that I’ve never finished. Sometimes I’ll skim the “slower” ones and then toss it aside.
Hi NJ, it’s really interesting seeing how far people will read into a book to see if they can get into it.