Which bits of books do you skip?

[BigDahliaFan]

Just reading another thread and Lord of the Rings came up .... I skipped over all the Tom Bombadil bits....

Ginger lives in this house, or rather we just skip that she’s dead. (Black Beauty).

If I’m skipping parts of a book because it’s full or not well written - then it’s dead in the water for me and I move on

Life too short when there are so many incredible books out there

I don't need overly long and overly flowery descriptions of nature.

Long descriptive passages. Dreams.

The El-Ahrehra (sp?) folktale nonsense in Watership Down.

I never read the epilogue or prologue. I just want to read the main bit, if it's important cal it chapter 1 or chapter 50 or whatever

I love an epilogue! Especially if I’ve really loved the characters

I loved the Tom Bombadil chapter. Get a good audiobook – the reader really brings him alive. Tolkien created a strange, non-human character there, with his own distinctive, and not-quite-human way of speaking. When you hear someone read it out loud the effect can be overwhelming.

However, other parts of LOTRs are too much for me. I'm reading it for the first time atm and the final volume is dragging. I'm all for skipping. Not even the greatest writers are consistently great. Even Harold Bloom admits that parts of Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolstoy, Woolf and Austen could be cut.

I skip sex scenes, they just make me cringe, I'm a massive prude though!

Dreams. Letters and pages of italics (which I hate hate hate!) I will just skim read.

Joseph in wuthering heights speaking in his broad yorkshire accent, one of my favourite books but so difficult to read this part.

And here's me being shocked people are skipping bits?! What if it's important? What if it reveals something later on or makes you think of a character in a different way? Foreshadowing? I couldn't do it.

All the farming bits in Anna Karenina. A lot of the elven lore in Tolkein.

I never read an introduction to a classic as it invariably has spoilers.

The introduction, especially in classic books .

Got cheated a few times where they tell you the entire actual plot of a book in the introduction, it's so annoying

Songs, riddles and stories. I find them boring and they detract from the actual main plot. I just. Don't. Care.

LOTR is particularly bad for this.

Not necessarily skip but if I'm finding it hard to get into the story I skip to the last page or so to find out what happens and sometimes then I finish the book

I joined this thread to say LOTR! All the poems/songs. And I skim read TB. Actually a lot of the LOTR is a bit slow. Peter Jackson certainly used all the best bits in the films.

Elvish poetry.

Songs and poems. Always.

The end

I don't really know why I do this (and I don't always do it), but I hit a point very suddenly where I don't want to go on any further. I think it might be to with finding the finality of an ending unatural and uncomfortable and wanting to preserve that feeling of being immersed in a story, but that is just a guess.

It's a bit embarrassing when some of my favourite books haven't actually been finished!

Bad sex scenes, graphic violence, sometimes long descriptions of nature and often songs/poems as others have said.
Didn't particularly enjoy 'Where The Crawdads Sing' anyway but all that terrible poetry and nature writing was the final nail in the coffin.

Action or sport especially Quidditch and also the back cover, at least not until the end.

Funny, I liked the poems and riddles a lot. It's the battle scenes that bore me. The Siege of Gondor is a drag. Tolkien's real gift is for language. He's at his best when he gives his characters their own weird way of speaking: Gollum, Tom Bombadil and Treebeard are vivid and real because they each speak in a distinctive way. Dickens and P. G. Wodehouse are also masters of it. Uriah Heap, Magwitch, Joe, Peggoty, Jeeves, Bertie, etc all speak their own language. Aldous Huxley's characters, on the other hand, all sound alike.

Sex scenes. I'm not a prude, I just think they're boring and rarely, if ever relevant to the plot development.

This for me. Absolutely. I might even look at the ending before ditching it. In fact I really like that 'I am becoming riveted' feeling that you get from something really good.