Books and skipping

[skywolfblue]

If I have to skip a section it always gives the series a red mark.

Why should I have to skip to get to the good stuff?
The ending always seems tainted when I skip. "Yay we win, but remember that reaaaallly booorrring part a few pages back?"
If it's 60% BS, why am I wasting my time with the series at all?

I don't enjoy books with long sections of boring stuff.

Wheel of Time is one of those series that was just so bad I read 3 novels and then stopped reading them completely.

 

[Elfgore]

Never. I would put down a book before I ever got to that point. I have precious time to read and way to many books to waste my time on a crappy novel.

 

[Poetic Nova]

No. Never even considered it. I'll give up on a book if it's bad, but I'll never skip any parts.

Exactly how I would.
One book I remember was from Stephen King, one of his later works. Overall it was a good book but there was one chapter that just dragged on and on.

 

[lastcigarette]

I don't skip but I will quickly skim through sections I don't find as interesting. As for the WoT I finally had to resort to audio books to fish the series. Jordan had some good concepts for female characters bit his implementation was terrible. The only one that held my interest was Lanfear. Nanaeve started out with potential but with all get hair tugging should have been bald by the end of the series.

 

[Childe]

A question to all: do you skip paragraphs/chapters/volumes in novels/series when you like the content but dislike or get bored with only certain parts of it?

This question is entirely inspired by my first reading of the Wheel of Time (which I never read before because of the sheer length of the series was daunting.) The ones who already read the series probably know the reason, but for the uninitiated: Robert Jordan is a great writer when it comes to prose, world-building and action, but he happens to write some of the worst relationship writing in existence (90% of the couples are literally strangled by the red string, because the pattern/fate needs them to be together for it to work out) coupled with some of the most annoying one-note female characters ever written (all the female leads are either immature idiots or know-it-all smug-snakes, and they somehow manage to ALWAYS make situations worse), which is pretty bad when roughly 50% of the books are told from their perspective.

And here's the crux: Lately I have been following a pattern; I read all the chapters with the male perspective, then when it switches to one of the female leads, I hit up WoTwiki, read the synopsis of that chapter, and then if I find that interesting I grind my teeth through the actual part, while if not then I just skip to the next one. Admittedly this is a fairly unique situation, as not many books have synopses broken down by chapters freely available, but it works.

On a bigger scale though, I am probably going to do the same to the entire middle section of the series, which is the infamous five-book cluster where literally nothing happens, but plan on getting back to the last four books and read them in full afterwards.

So here's the question again: Have any of you guys done anything similar before, or just skipped large parts of a book or series in general? Please do share your experiences and opinions.

Yeahhh while its a great series I hated the women in the Wheel of Time so much.....he just couldn't make them interesting....

OT: I skip a lot in books but only after i've read the book once or twice...first time i read the book through....except for one case where the book just got really weird so i skipped to the end and left it at that. I skip a lot more when it comes to movies and tv shows though.

 

[Fox12]

No. Never even considered it. I'll give up on a book if it's bad, but I'll never skip any parts.

This is largely my stance, I couldn't imagine doing that with a book worth reading. If it's that bad then I'll rarely pass the first chapter. I have too many books to read to waste time on poorly written literature. I will sometimes reread specific chapters of books I like, but not the whole novel. In fact, I do that frequently with Watchmen.

There is one exception. Game of Thrones. I felt like the plot had devolved into a meandering mess that failed to go anywhere, and that half the novels were pointless filler. So I tried an experiment, and skipped every character that I thought was the most pointless. I then read the following book to see if I had missed any important plot points. Nope. Martin could cut out entire characters, and hundreds of pages of each book and lose nothing. I never bothered finishing the series after that. A shame, it had potential.

 

[soren7550]

I think I skipped about a third to a half of Watchmen, since I didn't care about the comic within the comic, and a lot of the end of chapter/issue news articles.

 

[GabeZhul]

SNIP

If you are reading a huge series in which 40% is good, and the rest drivel, why read it at all? How do you know if you are skipping a good bit or not? All the books I have read recently each scene is important... if not to the actual story it is to the characters development. If I skipped all the ball scenes in Mistborn because they were a change in pace I would have missed some of the most important parts of Vin's development throughout the books.

Because, as I stated before, that 40% greatness totals to about 1.6M words, a length that is greater than the entire ASOIAF series put together, cover to cover.

As for how I know which chapter is good, I have also answered that already: The ones with a male perspective, or at the very least following the male leads, because any chapter that is predominated by the female characters is cringe-worthy, and I am not alone with this assertion, as you can see from the posts of the people who also read the series. Also, I am not just skipping chapters, I read a synopsis of each one of them to see if I would be missing anything plot-relevant, and I go through them if the topic of the chapter looks interesting (like whenever the Aes Sedai characters are discussing magic or dreams or any other world-building.) Not to mention, the "destiny says so" trope is very strong with WoT (in a way it was one of the old series that created the modern trope), so most of the foreshadowing is very blunt-force-trauma anyway.

As for character development, again, WoT is positively infamous for pulling the handbrake at the end of the fifth book and nothing happening until book 11. Most importantly, there is no character-development for any of the female characters (another thing that makes then unbearable, as the male leads are actually constantly getting better and more interesting) from book 2 until the last three books written by Sanderson.

As for your book recommendations... dude, I have read two-thirds of those, and they are the reason why I positively loathe the modern dark/low fantasy genre and why I never even bothered with the rest (or ASOIAF, if we are that). In fact, chances are you can point at a fantasy series (aside of the other WoT style long-runners, like the Malazan books or the Shantara cycle) and I have either read them or I have heard of them but have no interest in them.

 

[Kaymish]

no i usually just grin and bear through the bad parts of a book or if it gets too much i will just dump the whole thing i only skipped through the Ozzie Izzacs parts of the Commonwealth saga when i went back and re read it not so much because its boring but because the rest of it is so much more interesting also its pretty samey its easy to remember the parts and because its an opera the chapter starts with a character and follows them all the way to the end of it where it either stays with them or it changes to another character which makes easier to skip through the sections i don't like

 

[The Almighty Aardvark]

Very, very occasionally. The only time I'll ever really do it is when I notice that an author tends to go overlong with their descriptions of people, places, etc... In those cases, sometimes I'll just skip the rest of the description once I've gotten the gist. I don't need another several paragraphs of flowery words to drive it home for me

 

[Elementary - Dear Watson]

As for your book recommendations... dude, I have read two-thirds of those, and they are the reason why I positively loathe the modern dark/low fantasy genre and why I never even bothered with the rest (or ASOIAF, if we are that). In fact, chances are you can point at a fantasy series (aside of the other WoT style long-runners, like the Malazan books or the Shantara cycle) and I have either read them or I have heard of them but have no interest in them.

I don't even know what to say to this. Why are you even bothering?

You know what? I don't like RomComs. They may be good films, but they don't do it for me. I also don't spend all my time watching them trying to find one I like, moaning about it when I can't, skip the bits that annoy me about it, then take to the internet to vent about how I didn't like them.

Maybe you should try a different genre? A Spy Among Friends is a great spy novel... and Ghost Force: The Secret History Of The SAS is a good account of British military history, including the controversial side.

 

[GabeZhul]

As for your book recommendations... dude, I have read two-thirds of those, and they are the reason why I positively loathe the modern dark/low fantasy genre and why I never even bothered with the rest (or ASOIAF, if we are that). In fact, chances are you can point at a fantasy series (aside of the other WoT style long-runners, like the Malazan books or the Shantara cycle) and I have either read them or I have heard of them but have no interest in them.

I don't even know what to say to this. Why are you even bothering?

You know what? I don't like RomComs. They may be good films, but they don't do it for me. I also don't spend all my time watching them trying to find one I like, moaning about it when I can't, skip the bits that annoy me about it, then take to the internet to vent about how I didn't like them.

Maybe you should try a different genre? A Spy Among Friends is a great spy novel... and Ghost Force: The Secret History Of The SAS is a good account of British military history, including the controversial side.

Why am I bothering with what? As I said, have read practically all there is when it comes to fantasy (save for the ridiculously long ones, which I am just tackling right now), and because of that I know exactly what I want from a fantasy story. High/Heroic Fantasy (WoT, David Eddign's works, etc.) is very, very different from Low/Dark Fantasy (ASOIAF, NA, the Mystborn series, etc.) and since I know for a fact that I don't like the latter, and I can differentiate between the two, I don't see how not bothering with those relates to skipping parts of a series I am actually interested in. On the other hand I don't even know what your RomCom thing is supposed to be, it's not even a straw-man.

For your recommendations, again, my bookshelf is already groaning under the weight of a bunch of long-running series I am planning to read. I did not come here for recommendations and especially not for recommendations for a completely different genre that I have less than zero interest in. Please stop.

As for the venting, yeah, guilty as charged, but it's not like I am some sort of weird outlier; when it comes to the WoT series, it is generally viewed as one of the big classics of the genre and at the same time containing some of the worst female characters and gender politics. Because of this you could say that I am half venting and half just re-iterating the general consensus of the fans of the series. In fact the whole skipping thing wasn't even my idea, I have heard it on one of the dedicated fan forums, with actual guidelines, and I was curious if other people done similar things to other books. Judging from the responses, the Song of Ice and Fire series seem to be in similar shoes.

 

[Queen Michael]

When I skip something (IF I skip something) in a book, it usually falls into three distinct categories: it's either cringe-humor, something involving annoying/unlikable characters or violence-porn. Boring parts, on the other hand, I never had any problem with.

Gods, I hate cringe-humor. I try to avoid things that feature it altogether.

no i usually just grin and bear through the bad parts of a book or if it gets too much i will just dump the whole thing i only skipped through the Ozzie Izzacs parts of the Commonwealth saga when i went back and re read it not so much because its boring but because the rest of it is so much more interesting also its pretty samey its easy to remember the parts and because its an opera the chapter starts with a character and follows them all the way to the end of it where it either stays with them or it changes to another character which makes easier to skip through the sections i don't like

I was just thinking about this! I'm reading the Commonwealth Saga right now, and while I never skip parts of a book, I must admit that whenever I get to another part wiht Ozzie Isaacs, I think Oh no, another fifteen pages of "They walked and walked, and there was nature around them, and the nature looked this way, and they kept walking, and Orion said "How much longer are we going to walk?" and Ozzie replied "A bit more, dude."

Snip snippety snip

I read Cerebus once, and that comic book could get extremely tedious at times. For instance:

At one point, there's a very very long and dry and boring description of a bar. It's written in the same style as the parts in the Bible where Solomon's temple is described.

One part of over a hundred pages was an analysis of parts of the Old Testament. Just to be clear: This is a comic book, but for this part they switched to pure-text sections and printed an analysis of the Old Testament. And the text was printed like in the Bible-- two columns o very small font-size. For over a hundred pages of standard comic book size. It was a trial getting through them, but I did it. Even though those pages had zero connection to the rest of the plot, and only existed because the comic's creator wanted to present his view on the Pentateuch.

 

[GabeZhul]

Snip snippety snip

I read Cerebus once, and that comic book could get extremely tedious at times. For instance:

At one point, there's a very very long and dry and boring description of a bar. It's written in the same style as the parts in the Bible where Solomon's temple is described.

One part of over a hundred pages was an analysis of parts of the Old Testament. Just to be clear: This is a comic book, but for this part they switched to pure-text sections and printed an analysis of the Old Testament. And the text was printed like in the Bible-- two columns o very small font-size. For over a hundred pages of standard comic book size. It was a trial getting through them, but I did it. Even though those pages had zero connection to the rest of the plot, and only existed because the comic's creator wanted to present his view on the Pentateuch.

Wait, that Cerebus? The one after which the Cerebus Syndrome [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CerebusSyndrome] trope is named? The one which was started in 1977, ran for nearly thirty years, over 6000 pages long, had the author practically go crazy midway through and is viewed as one of the weirdest and most controversial works ever?
...
You, my good man, deserve a medal. I don't know what kind of medal, but if there is none that fits, one should be invented.

 

[Lodgem]

I don't deliberately skip sections in a book, although there have been times when I wasn't interested in parts of the story where I've realise I haven't remembered anything that has happened for the last couple of pages.

The closest I came was the Mistborn trilogy. I started to lose interest in the main story and was tempted to just read the short sections of (usually historical) narrative at the top of each chapter.

 

[Sleepy Sol]

Not typically. But it takes a lot for a novel to keep my attention enough to actually read through the entire thing in the first place. I haven't read a novel out of anything but obligation for almost as long as I've been alive. Only a scarce few books have really been an exception to that rule.

 

[Queen Michael]

Wait, that Cerebus? The one after which the Cerebus Syndrome [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CerebusSyndrome] trope is named after? The one which was started in 1977, ran for nearly thirty years, over 6000 pages long, had the author practically go crazy midway through and is viewed as one of the weirdest and most controversial works ever?
...
You, my good man, deserve a medal. I don't know what kind of medal, but if there is none that fits, one should be invented.

That's the one! My local library has all the trade paperbacks, so all I needed to buy was the comic book where you could read the handful of issues not collected in them, and I could read all 300 issues. It's one of my ten all-time favorite comics.

 

[Artina89]

No I don't tend to skip over things when I read a book, if I lose interest I will just stop reading it entirely and put it to one side to attempt to read again at a future date. People do tend to think I am a bit strange for doing that, especially at the moment as I am reading Capital by Karl Marx. I am not a communist, but I saw all three volumes at a cheap bookstore and thought that I might as well see if I can understand it. No knowledge is wasted and all that.