The Bookman, by Lavie Tidhar
This book has a fairly decent and original plot. It's steampunk + alternate history + lizard kings + characters based on historical and literary figures + adventure, which should be a cool combination, except that it's very difficult to care about any of it.
How difficult? At one point, I had twenty-five pages before the end of the book. I wasn't particularly tired or busy, and there was no reason why I couldn't just finish it that night. And yet, I decided to surf the internet and go to bed instead.
Let me repeat that: Twenty-five pages, and I couldn't bring myself to grit my teeth and read them. (I ended up finishing it the next morning.)
Why was it so difficult? It wasn't boring--on the contrary, there was a lot of stuff happening. The problem was the characters. The only one in the book who has significant screen time is Orphan, the protagonist, and he is about as flat as they get. He has very little by way of personality, and he is relatively passive. He's passive enough that I couldn't even bring myself to hate him. I just didn't care. He gets shuffled around from situation to situation, and all he cares about is his dead fiance. (And with how little screen time she gets, and how early she dies, the reader pretty much forgets everything about her, making it nearly impossible to sympathize with his feelings.)