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Had a guy in my book club argue that To Kill a Mockingbird is overrated because 'nothing happens' for 200 pages
I mean, we were reading it for our March meeting and this dude kept saying the book was boring because Scout is just running around and Atticus is sitting on a porch. He said the trial part was the only good section. I tried to explain that the whole first half is about building this small town and showing how normal people act so when the trial hits you feel the weight of it. He wasn't buying it. It made me wonder if some people just want plot bombs every chapter and miss how setting up the quiet stuff makes the big moments hit harder. Has anyone else run into someone in their club who totally misses the point of setup in slower books?
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ramirez.sage13d ago
Are you the kind of reader who usually falls into the "action only" camp? I used to be that way, I'd get antsy during long descriptions until I realized the whole point of a slow burn is to make the climax hit like a truck. Reading a book like Dune, you spend ages just learning the world and politics, and then when stuff finally pops off you actually care about the characters because you understand their normal lives.
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joseph_coleman13d ago
Isn't it pretty boring to wade through hundreds of pages of worldbuilding just to get a few pages of payoff at the end? I'd rather have a book that keeps me on the edge of my seat the whole way through than one that makes me slog through a desert of descriptions for one good fight scene. If a story can't hold my interest in the first fifty pages, why should I trust it to make the climax worth it later?
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