I used to skip the first 50 pages of every book until a retired librarian set me straight at a meetup

At a book club gathering in Portland last spring, an older lady named Fran told me I was missing the whole point of character setup by jumping ahead to the action. She said the slow build in the first chapters is what makes the payoff hit hard, like letting a stew simmer instead of burning it on high heat. I argued back for a bit, but then she pulled out her copy of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and showed me how the early scenes frame the whole story. Now I force myself to read every single page from the start, and honestly it changed how I feel about books I used to call boring. Has anyone else had a similar wake-up call from a fellow reader about your reading habits?

2 comments

2 Comments

diana_bell7422h ago

Oh man, that's such a good point! I used to be guilty of the same thing, skipping ahead to the good parts and then wondering why I felt lost later. Fran sounds like a total gem, seriously. Reading those early chapters feels like pulling teeth sometimes, but she's right about it being the setup for everything that follows. It's like building a house, you need a solid foundation before you can put on the fancy roof. I had a similar moment with a friend who made me sit through the first hundred pages of a slow fantasy novel, and now it's one of my all time favorites.

phoenixp3022h ago

Forget the foundation analogy for a second, maybe the slow parts are actually the author testing you to see if you're serious about the story. Like a weird loyalty test between you and the book.