Wow...there are a whole lot of excellent (at least I thought so) books in this thread. Most of the ones I've read that have been mentioned, actually. The only one I agree with is the Dune one. I really liked the first three Dune books. The ones afterward were very disappointing.
I'm not surprised at all the posts saying things like "I couldn't get past "x" number of pages", but I do question the validity of their classification of the books. How can you know what a book is like if you've only read 8-20 pages out of hundreds? For example, I read The Constant Gardener, by John le Carre for a class this year, and was really unimpressed by the first...50 or so pages. Having finished the book, I can honestly say I really enjoyed it, though. There was a lot of leadup, which was slow, but, once you got into the meat of the novel, it was riveting.
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