What Makes You Put Books Down?

Yesterday I discussed my resolution to stop reading bad books midway if they don't improve, breaking my lifelong habit of finishing everything. It was wasting my time, keeping me from works I enjoyed, and maybe even making me some enemies. This leaves me with two questions for you, exalted audience:

1. Do you abandon books?

2. If so, how do you decide what to ditch?

Do you look for particular qualities in your Science Non-Fiction, your Horror, your Paranormal Gothic Romances or whatnot? I've noticed the most people ditching books for having too many typos early on. Sloppy writing, sluggish pacing, and generally being boring are other common complaints, but I don’t know if these are reliable, and they worry me for my genre.

Yesterday I mentioned how I find the first hundred pages of George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones to be the dullest in the series. Excluding the prologue, they are a static period that introduces character upon character, where the biggest actions are riding and eating, and where most everyone stands around being discontented in some way until I just wanted to punch them. The book only hits its stride a few hundred pages later, where it becomes one of the best works of contemporary Fantasy I've yet read.

If I ditched all books because the openings were unappealing, I’d have missed out on some great late nights under the lamp. Right now I'm tearing through N.K. Jemisin's Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and I can't properly express how much better the second hundred pages are than the first. Once the double-soul stuff comes up? Yeine becomes much more interesting, as do the gods around her.

This concern for A Game of Thrones and Hundred Thousand Kingdoms extends to all Speculative Fiction. I really couldn't have figured that either book would improve as drastically as it did from what was laid out early on; their early periods are handled like typical setup periods. In all the contemporary SpecFic I’ve read since graduating college, fewer than ten novels hit the ground running. You know the typical start, don't you? Tell me if this sounds familiar:

The prologue doesn’t plug into the first chapter. World-building is overwhelmingly described more than it is depicted, you're told about characters rather than watching them behave, and there are inevitable hefty tumors of dialogue between people we don’t care about yet. We're supposed to care when authors set up conflicts, but because we're not really into the narrative yet, it feels more like consuming a documentary than an action flick. Exposition rules this zone, and unless that exposition is cleverly written or about something highly unusual for the genre (think Terry Pratchett, or Weiss & Hickman), it’s a chore to read.

You all know this stuff. This is the rite of passage into The Good Parts. Secondary World fiction particularly need you to set up the stage; once it’s set, the characters will (God willing) do cool stuff. And usually they do! While only ten books may have hit the ground running, many more turned out well.

Until I had this resolution, I unthinkingly put up with weak openings while simultaneously nodding at an industry that ranted about pacing and exposition. It’s either hypocrisy or paradox. I’m not sure which.

But this leaves me with the big question: what do you look for in your openings? Are you good at spying out which books will pan out well? What are your reliable indicators?