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Comment by markc | Hacker News Reader

I've read lots of SciFi over the years, some of it challenging. I can read hard books.

Back in the 80's I started seeing so many raves for TBotNS that I went out and bought them all at once.

About 80 pages into the first one, I was turned off, bored really. They sat on my shelf for a decade at least, before I just gave them away.

My question is this: how long did it take you to "get into" this series. Should I have plowed on further? Or tried a restart? (I read the first 100 pages of Dune about 3 times before it clicked, and I loved it all after that)

Or is it a taste/style thing, and if someone doesn't like it within 80 pages, they're not likely to enjoy the rest?

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I would say it really started to click for me after the part where the main character fights a duel (events subsequent to it pull the trick for the first time that will be repeated many times over the tetralogy of recasting previous events in a new light). If memory serves that's considerably more than halfway through the first book. I am generally bored by "young person who's clearly destined for greatness goes through various adventures around their school/apprenticeship/home town" and so once that part of the book was over I liked it a lot more. By the end I was loving it.

My experience: I read the entirety of the first two books, shrugged, and stopped there. Felt like I was investing a lot of effort into something that wasn't paying off, and didn't seem likely to pay off in the future. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

For what its worth I also love difficult books and didn't think The Book of the New Sun was very good. (I did finish it, and re-read a few parts.)

It aims at a great curiosity but like you say, is far too drab. I think it misses.

TBotNS doesn't become faster paced or more action packed later. If anything, it becomes more challenging since book requires reader to remember the details and actively seek solutions to puzzles the texts presents. However, you and your tastes in literature might have changed since 80s so you could give those first 100 or so pages a try to see if your perception of them changed.

My first read I bounced off of Shadow hard. Second reading I finished and loved it but then life got in the way early into Claw. 2020 was the year I blasted through all 5 books and am glad I did. The book is incredibly dense and does not hide that fact, so you have to be ready for such or you simply won't enjoy it.

Welcome to the club.

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