Empire of silence

Has anyone else struggled with this?

I’m at about 55% through and it’s a genuine slog to get through. Nothing is happening in terms of a large overarching plot. The side characters are so flat and barely have anything to them besides a name and a description of their face.

And I think the pacing is atrocious. There are so many scenes where the author stops the plot to just describe the environment for multiple pages.

If he’s not doing that, he’s interrupting the dialogue with descriptions of the environment.

Like I’m trying to read a conversation between 2 people. Not about how the sunlight hit the main character’s face as he was eating chips and realized that they were too salty.

Also sometimes the plot speeds up with small timeskips, while other times you literally can’t wait for it to end.

And we get teased with cool events that happen but nothing is delivered on and we don’t even know when that stuff will happen

I feel like half this book is just mundane description that could be cut out and nothing would change in the story.