I'd argue that the novels the TFA author reads are boring to the TFA author -- until they're not. If you are reading a novel that works for you, it's often not boring from the opening line.

Example: Anna Karenina. Gripping from the opening line (if you like the type of novel that it is; and it's fine if you don't, of course).

Or alternatively, Pride and Prejudice. Again, that opener just sucks you in (if this is a book for you, that is; and again, if it's not -- totally fine).

Example of a modern page-turner: The Hunger Games. If you are bored with this novel after three pages, you shouldn't read any further, because it's absolutely, certainly, not for you.

Or, Jeebus, Harry-Freaking-Potter. There is a reason that an entire generation grew up reading those books.

Or: "The Time Traveller's Wife", "The Poisonwood Bible", "The Road", "Interview with the Vampire", "A Room with a View", "Replay", "Of Mice and Men", "Brave New World". The list of books that are gripping from the start, should they appeal to you, can be almost endless.

Basically, if you and your book align (ugh, sorry), then there generally shouldn't be any form of "volta" (really, ugh).

There are many novels that are boring to me. I've never finished those; I discard and move on to the next one, where the author knew how to write something that isn't boring to me. Someone else might love them, and many people clearly do, but they're not for me.

Why do so many people assume that everyone will love the exact same books, and that if you're bored by a book you just have to work at it some more? Life is too short for that nonsense.

If you want to tell reading-skeptical kids about "the volta", please don't phrase it as "the volta". Just say that a lot of good novels need you to read them for a bit to see what's going on, and then it will get good. They might already be familiar with the idea from TV shows.

But also, it's extremely possible to write a novel that grabs you from the first page. Thriller writers are the most obvious case. A gripping concept or setting can do it, too. This author might think they're too cool for books like that, but we shouldn't keep them away from kids if that's what they want to read.

The problem is, sometimes I pick up a novel and it doesn’t have that, it’s just boring through (or I think it will be so I give up).

I wish it was easier to find out before investing so much time. Mainstream critics have different preferences than mine, my favorite works are all indie, but the people I find who like those also have different preferences. I read lots of plot summaries, but I think that has an opposite effect, ruining a novel that would interest me.

The key to enjoying novels is to read them in long enough sittings to get into the flow state. If you only read a couple pages at a time between doomscrolling sessions, it will feel like a chore. Anything would.

William Gibson is one of my favorite writers, and it's funny because I think he has the exact opposite problem. Most of his novels open on the action, in some interesting location. But gradually they get weaker, with a few (Mona Lisa Overdrive, in my case) becoming a real slog to finish. I've probably read the first 50 pages of Neuromancer 20 times, but only the entire novel 3-4 times in 20+ years.

There's the famous opening line to Neuromancer, "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." But I actually like the openings of Count Zero and Virtual Light more:

CZ: They sent a slamhound on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up with him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scrambling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT. He didn't see it coming.

The last he saw of India was the pink stucco facade of a place called the Khush-Oil Hotel. Because he had a good agent, he had a good contract. Because he had a good contract, he was in Singapore an hour after the explosion. Most of him, anyway The Dutch surgeon liked to joke about that, how an unspecified percentage of Turner hadn't made it out of Palam International on that first flight and had to spend the night there in a shed, in a support vat.

VL: The courier presses his forehead against layers of glass, argon, high-impact plastic. He watches a gunship traverse the city’s middle distance like a hunting wasp, death slung beneath its thorax in a smooth black pod.

IMO some writers are just better as short story writers, not novelists, but are forced into writing longer works by the publishing system.

Not ashamed to say that I love genre fiction and yes even comics with strong complex storylines. Sci-fi, mystery and supernatural (not purely horror) primarily and even middle grade fiction - both of these with little or absent fantasy/magic. That preference probably prejudices these voltas for me. I'm not sure if I'll ever read the so called great classics.

I remember reading the name of the rose by umber to eco, where I skimmed over the elaborate religious bits.

Yeah, there are plenty of slow burns.

Yet, I wouldn't go so far as to say every novel is one. If you aren't an established author, publishers won't take on your manuscript if it doesn't hook them with the first chapter, better even with the first page.

That doesn't mean that a well written first chapter will hook everyone, though.

One collary I'd add to this is that the opposite is also true. There have been plenty of times that I've trudged through the beginning of a novel, only to reach an "anti-volta" and realize that it isn't for me. It can incredibly frustrating and make the slog feel like a huge waste of time, but I still keep trying books. Maybe I'm just chasing the highs I felt when I first read the novels that got me into reading.

The problem with school children is most books that are assigned have no volta for them. Part of it is that modern storytelling has a much quicker volta through tv, movies, YouTube and now shorts. It’s hard to justify to a kid a 90 minute buildup to possible payoff vs getting it in five seconds for a 2 minute video.

I value writing style and pacing way more than any volta. Pride and Prejudice is hardly my genre, yet I remembered it grabbing me immediately. So just now I checked to see if I remembered it correctly, and within the first minute I laughed and I'm hooked again.

Life's too short for novels that might get good halfway through, especially when there's plenty Austen I haven't read yet.

The article focuses on novels, but of course many things in life are like this. Learning an instrument for example. It also brought to my mind that famous quote from Ira Glass about creative work.[1]

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/309485-nobody-tells-this-to...

I recently read Dungeon Crawler Carl. It’s pretty much interesting from the very beginning.

On the other hand, Blind Assassin was extremely boring to me until the very last page, but that last page blew my mind.

I appreciate Isherwood in this retrospect. Most of this novels have a sort of placid flow about human existence and the tedium of modern life, until the last few pages retell the moral with such rapidity that feels almost physical.

I call this process ‘threading the needle’ - some novels thread with ease, some do not thread with ease but the payoff is worth it in the end, some thread and then unthread, some never thread at all.

I used to have a recurring problem with Doctor Who (the newer one / reboot) where some episodes would be so boring at first that I would not get through them. I had some success in trying to assure myself that EVERY episode at least had SOMETHING interesting, and in practice they did. I have been trying to adopt that idea more in life.

As a kid I'd often start reading books from about the middle, if I liked it, I'd restart from the beginning before I finished, if I didn't, I got another book.

No, NOT every novel is boring from the get go. And some novels ARE boring. And the fact that so many people recommend the ones that are is the bloody problem.

The first thing to accept is that different people like different things. If someone likes the Beatles, you wouldn't immediately jump to recommend Handel or Black Sabbath.

And, yet, this is EXACTLY what people do all the time with literature. Oh, you liked that Vonnegut story? Here, have some Dickens. ARGHGHGHGHGHG! NO! NO! NO! NO! Give the Vonnegut reader some O. Henry or Roald Dahl--not Dickens or Bronte. Good grief.

I got lucky. My father understood this. He always recommended things that he thought I would like--interspersed very rarely with things that were good for me that I might or might not like. But he NEVER gave me anything he thought I would dislike simply because it was supposedly "great literature".

And, now, Dear Readers, I leave you with wisdom for the ages imparted from Wallace Stevens via my father: "The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream."

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45234/the-emperor-of-...

For years my youngest kid (10yo) showed no interest in reading. He would very sometimes try, but give up after a few pages.

But then he read a book that opened with the sentence “I thought I was being followed.”, and that was his gateway drug.

I fully credit the author, Maren Stoffels, for getting my boy into reading. Every book by her is exciting from the first page. If you’re Dutch and have kids, I warmly recommend “De Wisselaar”.

Furthermore - there are more than enough novels that grip you immediately, to spend your whole life reading them and avoiding the rest.

"The rest" tend to come in two categories. Books I lack some experience for to be gripped by - which I may come back to in future. And bad books - which I will not. YOLO.

Margaret Mitchell got me to read a thousand pages of Gone With The Wind because she placed a juicy hook in the first chapter (Ashley) which gave me the motivation to read the entire book to see what happens.

Why more novels do not have central hooks I do not know. Hooks are usually what keep me reading, unless the book has some kind of reason for being interesting otherwise.

It took me more than a week to go through the first chapter in the first Harry Potter book.

It took me 4 days to finish the rest. This is because the pacing was wrong - the first chapter should have been the last.

There was a rule a fourth grade teacher of mine had that she used in her English class to try and get some of the less literate kids up to par. That rule was embodied by the name she gave it, "Thirty minutes thirty pages." She gave them thirty minutes to read thirty pages of a book. A minute a page. Considering most of them were choosing things like Goosebumps that were only a hundred and twenty pages or so it was an easy enough ask. But because she set it as a challenge so many of them went blasting beyond that. Many would finish half the book during that thirty minute reading period. The interesting thing I didn't pick up on until years later as an adult was that it was also slow enough that they could actually understand and remember what they were reading rather than just blasting through it. It left the slower readers with enough time and didn't make them feel like they were falling behind while encouraging them to learn how to read faster.

Many modern adult book series are six hundred pages or more for a single installment with about four hundred words a page versus the maybe hundred and fifty of a children's book like Goosebumps. Since it's three to four times the text that makes thirty pages thirty minutes actually viable as a self challenge even as an adult.

That's one part of it. The author needs to make it engaging as well so you get to flow state easier.

There is a good book "The science of storytelling" (Will Storr) which points out the techniques used by famous stories. Those techniques allow the reader to be more invested in the story.

Dungeon Crawler Carl for example uses some of the techniques (intentional or not).

Reading in 5 min bursts in-between longer sessions can remain a valid strategy, but you have to carry the book with you everywhere for it to work out.

> The key to enjoying novels is to read them in long enough sittings to get into the flow state

As a voracious reader, I both agree and disagree with this.

There are some books that simply take too long to come to the point. I'm reading an ARC of a dark academia that's highly rated. I'm 60% in and I haven't yet gotten interested in it. I read entire "Billy Summers" in 2 days by halting the previous book's read. So yeah, the onus is also on the author to make the book interesting

Full disclosure: I am not a tiktok or reel addict. I've read 65 books last year, currently on my 45th book of 2026. I love long books.

Yes! The opening line of Pride and Prejudice alone is already immediately captivating. And then makes you re-read it again, after you finish the book and it suddenly shines differently.

I feel enormously fortunate for being fluent in Russian, reading Bulgakov and Tolstoy in original is pure joy, any translation removes subtleties - it's like listening to Bach through the car stereo, you still can enjoy it, but it won't make you want to cry, like listening in symphony hall might. If I had no other reason for learning English but to understand the prose of Austen, it'd still be worth it. And I'm just discovering the simple elegance of G.G. Márquez in Spanish. He does a similar trick in the first line of Cien años. "Había de recordar" is a future seen from the past, and Spanish carries it without strain. English has to choose between "was to remember" and "would remember", and both just miss it. The sentence sets up the whole book's time scheme in five words, and the beauty of it has to be contemplated.

Sometimes, reading a single passage from a book, I mean truly, deeply, honestly letting it sink into your subconsciousness makes up for all the insufficiencies in the story.

For me there are novels with such big pay-offs that they are worth 100s of pages of setup to me. I usually only start them when I read online that they are worth it. I had this with Atlas Shrugged (500-600 pages of setup?).

Some are simply such a nice world (and indeed writing style) that they don’t even really need a Volta. I had that with the Commonwealth Saga by Hamilton. I just wanted it to go on and on (and it does for >2400 pages). (I was sadly disappointed by the follow-ups which are much less "sci"). Same with the Bobiverse books, eagerly awaiting part 6, although I still want to be in that world, it also feels like it should come to some beautiful end before dragging on too long...