What’s something that you feel like you should like, but for some reason can’t get into, no matter how many chances you give it?
For me, it’s The Three Body Problem. It should be right up my alley from everything I’ve heard about it (especially the second book, which looks at the Fermi Paradox and the Great Filter!), but for the life of me, I can’t get past the first chapter at all. I even tried reading it in another language to see if it was the translation that kept me from getting into it, and nope.
The beginning of 3BP is very, very dry and slow. There’s a lot of exposition, and a massive amount of footnotes (which I personally found very helpful as like many westerners, I have extremely limited knowledge of Chinese history).
I highly recommend persevering and soldiering on, there’s a reason why it’s very highly rated. One of my favourite series and totally made me do a 180 on my opinion of SETI.
I really enjoyed the cultural revolution stuff - very interesting. The VR world or whatever I absolutely just couldn’t care about. The folding and the desiccating were neat, once it became more real in the story, but in general I just found the writing or translation insufferable.