Multiple Narrative strand / multiple viewpoint character books, do you sometimes skip a strand entirely?

[Serious Callers Only]

I recently did this on first reading of the widows house, just for the hell of it, and it 'worked' because the people i choose to read are the only strands that actually meet during the book (i suspected it would be so). I was wondering if other people sometimes do the same (even on first readings, which is probably sacrilege on some religion), and if so on what books, and did it work for you?

Maybe it will feel like reading 2 different books if i read the other strands now.

[Darth Richard II]

Never.

[Toblakai]

No. I can't believe people do this.

[Unlady B]

There are books/novels that are meant to be read like that. The reader chooses where to start, and which chapter to read next.

The coherence of the story varies.

[Altherion]

No, never on a first reading. However, I have done rereads where I read exclusively the chapters from a single character's point of view and then start over with a different character.

[Seli]

I've done it one re-reads (Peter F Hamilton, Jordan). But never on a first read. But that is because I then know the story and skip boring parts.

[SilentRoamer]

Seli was the Peter F Hamilton you reference Eddards strand in the Void series as I can see how that would basically read as a novella.

Interested which Hamilton book you did this for?

[Seli]

Seli was the Peter F Hamilton you reference Eddards strand in the Void series as I can see how that would basically read as a novella.

Interested which Hamilton book you did this for?

I don't think I've reread the void books yet, but it could clearly work there.

I've done it for the Night's dawn trilogy. Skipping large parts of the Lalonde and Kulu storylines.

[Richard]

No.

The fact you'd feel any desire to do this means the book has failed (allowing that it's a defined conventional narrative, that is, and not something experimental as cited by Baltan). Any novel that has that effect on you, better IMHO just to dump it and find something better to read. Life is short.

[Yersinia]

I vaguely remember skipping over portions of Lord of the Rings as a kid. The battles didn't really interest me, and I mostly just wanted to know what would happen to Frodo and Sam.

Now if I find myself wishing for certain characters to die so that I won't have to read their point of view any longer, I just stop reading.

[matt b]

I would never think of doing that on a first read. The chances of missing something major from one of the other narrative strands would just be too high for me to consider such a thing.

[First of My Name]

To echo most of the other replies: no, never.

[Tears of Lys]

I can recall skipping past other POVs in SoIaF just to find out what happened to Arya, Dany, or Bran, for example. But I always went back and read the ones I missed before I proceeded on further in the book.

Sometimes I'm just too damn interested in a certain person's story. I won't do that in "The Widow's House" from The Dagger and Coin series. the writing is just too beautiful.

Did anyone notice that I FINALLY GOT MY BOOK FROM AMAZON???!!! :SnoopyHappyDance:

[The Reckoner]

Back when I took a crack at The Eye of the World, I tried skipping everything dealing with that royal court. In the end, I decided that the Wheel of Time wasn't for me. At the time I was a kid and thought there was a certain "way" that fantasy "should be." Hence me going for Eye of the World and other Tolkienesque novels.

[Night's_King]

I don't skip whole plotlines, but I tend to skip paragraphs or to skim POV's (Arya and Catelyn for example).

[emberling]

The fact you'd feel any desire to do this means the book has failed (allowing that it's a defined conventional narrative, that is, and not something experimental as cited by Baltan). Any novel that has that effect on you, better IMHO just to dump it and find something better to read. Life is short.

Nonsense.

It is most likely a failure of the book, yes. Most books that come to mind where I habitually skip parts - they're not objectively very good. But if the book as a whole isn't objectively good, yet some smaller part of it brings us joy - all the more reason to extract that joy as we find it rather than throwing it aside and sulking because it wasn't perfect, and trying to mine for something more in the crap-pile that speaks to us.

Let's say I'm utterly entranced by a character's voice. I would, as we say, happily read about them shopping for groceries. But other PoVs lack that voice and some even actively grate on me. Why bother with them? But why throw out something I'm loving just because it's got some gristle mixed in?

The most obvious time to do this is the ubiquitous, always-irritating practice of giving interludes from the villain's PoV. I'm sure this has been done well, sometime. I can probably name one or two. But the vast majority are just a waste of time, especially on rereads where dramatic irony is kind of inherent already and doesn't need to be established explicitly. Should I throw out every book that does this? Nah, I'll pass. That's a lot of otherwise-fine books.

And of course, reading a series like ASoIaF one character at a time, rather than chronologically, is great fun, though not for first reads and a bit lessened by the loosened PoV structure in the later books.

[Freshwater Spartan]

Interesting experiment but I'd say if you have to skip chapters its probably not a good book. Read something else.

[Castel]

Completely? No. But I often wish I could without feeling like I missed something.

I often skimmed the children's sections of ASOIAF before I realized they were basically the only tolerable children in fiction but I've never outright skipped anything completely on the first read-through.

[Kikajon]

I would never think of doing that on a first read. The chances of missing something major from one of the other narrative strands would just be too high for me to consider such a thing.

This!

[Tears of Lys]

I say it's probably more a lack of something on the reader's part than the writer's.

That's not always true, but with the early books of aSoIaF it would be definitely true.