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Comment by warmwaffles | Hacker News Reader

My biggest problem with fiction books is that it is hard to build suspense when I can clearly see I have another 100 pages to go or if I know that it's a series. After I realized that in my late teens fiction was very difficult to keep at consistently.

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Interesting, I have the "reverse" problem. Mostly I read older books, random books and I've noticed a pattern in less known and maybe less skilled authors. Sometimes, especially in the books from the 1970s, the story just sort of stops. You're running out of pages, no resolution in sight and then the book stops. I mean there is a ending, but it feels short, half measured and not in tune with the rest of the book in some sense.

Maybe this was just the writing style at the time. 200 pages of storytelling, world building, details and plot development and then 20 pages to resolve and finish up. Frequently it doesn't even feel rushed, it is just less clear cut ending than newer books.

Most recent example I came across is Kramer vs Kramer. It's a short book overall, but the main plot is no more than 10% of the book and the resolution is two or three pages and then it just stops.

Some books I read to step foot into the life and head of some other person, to know what it is to be another gender or age or in a different culture and time period. We can only experience a small slice of what it is to be human in one lifetime. I guess one might get some of this from documentary work or autobiography.

And sometimes it’s just affirming to read an author describe a character thinking the same thoughts one has or the same situation one finds oneself in.

I think modern series tend to be better at that. Lots of author kill people you wouldn't expect them to kill early on so that you know that this is a universe where even if the protagonists must survive for plot reasons, there is still plenty of suspension about who else survives.

I will also say that to me there is a massive difference between how much effort it takes to read one type of fiction versus another. I was reading Master and Margarita and I stopped because they simply kept introducing new characters and doing jumps for no reason. I'm sure I will get a bunch of well-read people telling me it's because I'm a poor reader or whatever, but I think that's bad writing.

Hmm. I can't say it's ever been a problem for me. Especially it shouldn't matter much if it's a series or not. Depending on the author, the main characters may not even have a plot armor.

Sounds like you don't actually care about anything going on in the book, you're just trying to get to the end.

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