OK, I am on chapter 25. I feel like the book just got pretty interesting in the last couple of chapters or so. Now I want to see where it is going.
Strange... You and I had complete opposite reactions.I finished it. By the end I quite liked it. For the first 20 or more chapters, I could have set it aside at any point and gone on to something else.
Strange... You and I had complete opposite reactions.
I finished it. By the end I quite liked it. For the first 20 or more chapters, I could have set it aside at any point and gone on to something else.
I don't have to care about the characters, but they do have to be interesting. In Monument, which is a good book, I not only didn't care about the viewpoint character Ballas, I wanted him to die.
For me it's never really had to be about having an emotional response to the book. For me it's a lot more about whether the story itself is interesting or not.
Prince of Thorns (PoT) is case and point. I'm at chapter 14 or so and yeah, I'm not 'emotionally connected' to the characters, but I'm still intrigued by the story that surrounds them. For me that's the most important thing of any book. Good characters don't turn pages for me, interesting stories do.
The idea that you have to have an emotional response to a book is foreign to me. It's along the lines of "all things have to be like X." I hope literature never reaches that state of uniformity, personally, though everyone has their own view of what they want literature to be. I do think we've been moving in the direction of greater diversity, not only in content but in style and purpose, and I expect we'll continue to do so.