Books

If I really like a book or series and there are parts that are very dry to me, I just skim to see if there's anything I might miss. I rarely have to backtrack.

Believe it or not the detective storyline ties in.

As for the detective she’s methodical but wait until they get into her background too (which will offer some insights as to why)

I like the series but he can be a bit wordy. In the end Hamilton pays off but I completely understand where your coming from.

Pandora's Star all ties together, give it time. The second book is great too. I've read them both like a dozen times!

I had this problem with House of Leaves. The narrator components felt unnecessary, but I didn’t want to read only part of a book. The Navidson Record parts were fortunately compelling enough to pull me through the rest kicking and screaming. I ended up loving it and the narrator sections finally started to pay off to an extent.

Drop it. There are other 1 trillion books out there waiting for you that are worth your time, not like this one.

For this specific case (Pandoras Star) I urge you to push through. It took me half a year to finish it because it’s so much stuff that’s just boring in the first half of the book, but the later part of it definitely makes up for it. I’m reading Judas Unchained now even though I promised myself not to pick up a beast (800+ pages) for a good while.

I skip chapters. Game of Thrones was a tough one to power through because I hated most of the characters.

After the first book, I only read the Jon and Arya chapters, nothing else was interesting. When I hit the aftermath of the Red Wedding I had to backtrack and read Rob's chapter going "Man, glad I wasn't invested in him, that would have sucked!"

Under the Dome had a similar problem with large sections focused on the cardboard character villains so I started skipping the bits with them. I wanted to see how Barbie and the gang were working things out.