The first page of any hard book is the heaviest. It gets lighter every page after.

Page one is heavy because nothing is loaded yet. It asks you to hold unfamiliar names, a style you are not used to, and no sense of where any of this is going, all at once. Thirty pages later you are carrying most of that automatically and the reading speeds up. The difficulty was front-loaded, and people quit during the exact stretch that was always going to be the worst.

Commit to a page number rather than to a book. Tell yourself you will reach page thirty before deciding anything. If it is still heavy there, put it down without guilt and pick another.