An old librarian told me to skip the first 50 pages of any book - best advice ever?

I was venting about how I always quit books around page 70 because I got bored. This retired librarian at my local library in Austin said I should just skip the first 50 pages of every novel I start. She claimed authors spend too much time setting things up and you miss nothing. I tried it on three books last month and finished all of them for the first time in years. Has anyone else tried something like this, or am I just being a lazy reader?

3 comments

3 Comments

patricia_hill6013h agoMost Upvoted

Have you noticed it works better with some genres than others, like thrillers versus literary fiction? I tried it with a dense historical novel and ended up completely lost halfway through.

ben_fisher15h ago

Man that's wild but it actually makes a weird kind of sense. Did you ever try going back to read the first 50 pages after you finished the book to see if you actually missed anything important?

joseph_green1314h ago

Nah you're right @ben_fisher, I actually skimmed back through them after and it turns out the prologue set up a character who doesn't show up again until chapter 40 or something. Missed it completely the first time.