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.

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.

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...

The Blind Assassin is possibly one of the best novels of all time.

DCC is, well, not that.

Oof, maybe don't. A lot of them are written directly for children, which they mostly work for, but only later bits have stuff mostly for adults and are vaguely worth analysing.

You did not read the article completely, did you? For someone with wise father, you are not being wise yourself. The writer is exactly talking about this subjectivity.