Trying it out
It's so *quiet* here . . . .
So, question! How long does it take for you to decide whether or not you are going to like a book and want to keep reading it? What are your techniques for doing this?
I decide very quickly and my mom decides only after having read more than 3 chapters (sometimes a lot more). I'm curious what everyone else does.
The main criterion I have for reading is whether I like the writing style, so usually I just look at the first few pages and figure out whether I'll like it. Sometimes I go by just the first page, but I've decided to try and take longer, since it seems like good openings are so hard to write. Or at least hard to come across. It seems to me like the whole experience of the book outweighs a crappy opening, and if the opening is substandard, that will bring down the prose, so in order to get a representative sample one has to read further in the book. So sometimes I open to the middle and read some pages there.
Also. I hear a lot of people talking about characters not being 'believable' and how character A would never make the decision on page 45 because of X... I almost never come across a character making a decision that I don't believe they would have made. What makes a character unbelievable for me is only lack of complexity. Almost no one dedicates themselves to evil for evil's sake out here in the non-net world (possibly we're missing out). Villain simplicity is probably the most common kind of lack of character complexity I think is out there.
So how do you judge characters and their decisions?
So, question! How long does it take for you to decide whether or not you are going to like a book and want to keep reading it? What are your techniques for doing this?
I decide very quickly and my mom decides only after having read more than 3 chapters (sometimes a lot more). I'm curious what everyone else does.
The main criterion I have for reading is whether I like the writing style, so usually I just look at the first few pages and figure out whether I'll like it. Sometimes I go by just the first page, but I've decided to try and take longer, since it seems like good openings are so hard to write. Or at least hard to come across. It seems to me like the whole experience of the book outweighs a crappy opening, and if the opening is substandard, that will bring down the prose, so in order to get a representative sample one has to read further in the book. So sometimes I open to the middle and read some pages there.
Also. I hear a lot of people talking about characters not being 'believable' and how character A would never make the decision on page 45 because of X... I almost never come across a character making a decision that I don't believe they would have made. What makes a character unbelievable for me is only lack of complexity. Almost no one dedicates themselves to evil for evil's sake out here in the non-net world (possibly we're missing out). Villain simplicity is probably the most common kind of lack of character complexity I think is out there.
So how do you judge characters and their decisions?