54 words in the first sentence. 13 prepositional phrases. I was already exhausted by the end of the first sentence.
I've never understood the concept of deciding whether to stop reading or keep going based on one sentence. It's just one sentence out of thousands of sentences for God's sake. Give it at least a few pages.
I must have I missed that bit. Actually, I would hope at this point that you would realize that you have nothing to explain. My reading of the thread is that everyone understands what you were trying to do. Please come join the discussion over in the Writing Prompts section entitled "Openings that worked...and some that didn't" where we have been discussing that very phenomenon.
I should've been a bit clearer: the things I said hold true to me personally. There are so many books I'm itching to read as soon as I have the time and finish the previous ones that if I have to decide whether to read a book or not based on one paragraph and it was that particular paragraph, I'd decline the honor because it doesn't do anything for me. There are plenty of famous and acclaimed books that I've read that have bored or annoyed me, so nowadays I tend to pass them by if the premise, writing etc. don't inspire me instead of reading it just because it's famous or acclaimed. And yes, you could say what I said about (the paragraph) just about any piece. The thing is, if the opening paragraph was written more fluently and contained things or characters I'd be interested in, then I'd keep reading.
