I feel exactly the same way. The Dispossessed was both one of the best and one of the most boring books I've ever read. There are a lot of things I appreciate about it and I'm glad I read it, but damn was it a slog to get through.
I would say the first few chapters (or rather the first few chronological chapters dealing with his childhood) were a uphill climb. But after that its quite fascinating, and I felt the story was pulling me along forward.
I can't understand this perspective! Even now, just flipping through random pages looking for a quote, I keep getting sucked back in!
> He thanked her, with the simplicity of one who does not look behind the offer for the offer's motive. She studied him for a moment, her eyes shrewd, direct, and quiet. "I heard your speech," she said.
> He looked at her as from a distance. "Speech?"
> "When you spoke at the great demonstration in Capitol Square. A week ago today. We always listen to the clandestine radio, the Socialist Workers' and the Libertarians' broadcasts. Of course, they were reporting the demonstration. I heard you speak. I was very moved. Then there was a noise, a strange noise, and one could hear the crowd beginning to shout. They did not explain. There was screaming. Then it died off the air suddenly. It was terrible, terrible to listen to. And you were there. How did you escape from that? How did you get out of the city? Old Town is still cordoned off; there are three regiments of the army in Nio; they round up strikers and suspects by the dozen and hundred every day. How did you get here?"
> He smiled faintly. "In a taxi."
----
> "I was not to be near the powder mill. I was to be kept from the populace, to live among scholars and the rich. Not to see the poor. Not to see anything ugly. I was to be wrapped up in cotton in a box in a wrapping in a carton in a plastic film, like everything here. There I was to be happy and do my work, the work I could not do on Anarres. And when it was done I was to give it to them, so they could threaten you with it."
> "Threaten us? Terra, you mean, and Hain, and the other interspatial powers? Threaten us with what?"
> "With the annihilation of space."
---
How can you not want to read more!? I remember this, such a moving scene, from reading it many years ago. The entire story is rife with tension, in my view. How will the destinies of all these many billions of people unfold from the actions taken in these few moments by these few people?
The most interesting part of the book is how at the start you think "this is going to be a book about how Capitalism sucks and is bad for people", but it turns out that the Communists also sucked although their suck was spread out more evenly among the people.
> And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people —TDJP
