Instruct: Classify Amazon reviews into positive or negative sentiment
Query: Great short story w/ 300 unnecessary pages

This book came highly recommended, but was for the most part a letdown. The first one-fifth or so of the book was so boring that I put it aside for a year and then picked it up later after I was told that, yeah, the beginning is boring but you have to push through because it's such an amazing book. Most of the rest of the book is relatively more readable, but there was a lot of tedious technical description that I don't really want to spend my time on in fiction. I kept wondering "when is the payoff for all this?" Finally in the last 50 pages you do get to the payoff, and it is okay, but not so great that it redeems the previous 350 pages. In summary, 90% of the book is an overly-elaborate setup for a "punchline" that is somewhat interesting, but by no means mind-blowing.