but could you do it in a paragraph, maybe two?
I come by this preference honestly: Dad's the same way. He actually gets MORE frustrated...he reads a lot of mysteries and he just wants a crime to happen in the first few pages and then an investigation to begin in the first chapter. None of this nonsense about getting to know all the neighbors or townsfolk or families of the inspectors or whatnot.
One of the hardest books I ever read was A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. It's roughly 600 pages long and the stuff you think is drivel that you can skip over winds up being VERY important in the last 100 pages. It took me 18 months to read the first 500 pages (I couldn't quit: a friend gifted me and bff with copies, saying the book "changed her life") and then read the last 100 pages in a little over an hour one afternoon. I wouldn't call the book exactly "life-changing" but I *did* upgrade it from bloated garbage to...kind of brilliant.
