The read-on moment

So I've been reading The Hundred-Year-Old Man who Climbed out of a Window and Disappeared, the novel that ' everybody'  has read and that is still in the top 10 of English novels at my local book shop (where, probably, about 10 people buy an English book a week, so it may not be a very accurate representation), and to tell you the truth, I didn't like it very much.
The writing style interesting, typically Scandinavian (even in translation this shines through), and it takes a while to get into. Jonasson likes to explain things that are very very obvious. He likes to give so many details that when asked you could actually tell which colour someones toe-nails were painted. He likes to make most of his characters either very stupid or very weird. All of this is amusing, funny even, when you start to read, but as you get to page 50 you start to think: is he still using this trick? I'm kinda done with it now!
Around page 150, I was seriously contemplating not reading any more. I hardly ever put down a book without completely finishing it, but this might have been one of those rare cases.
But then, somehow, he made me read on. It was not that the story gripped me (I won't spoil too much, but it is sort of a murder-mystery combined with Forrest Gump, only in this world, Forrest would be one of the normal guys compared to most of the characters), you can see where this story is going from about chapter 2. No, his writing style somehow got better, more natural, less in-your-face typical. The annoying little side-steps and superfluous 'of course' and minute detail somehow worked. It felt like Jonasson himself was struggling to get to this part of the novel, and now that he was half-way, and knew where it was going, he could somehow relax and write better.
Which is funny, because that is exactly what happens when I write a novel.
But leaving that aside, for me, every novel has sort of a 'read-on' moment, when you get totally immersed in the story and just cannot put it down. For some novels, this is the first line, such as "Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much" or "Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her" (if you don't know where these are from and do care, look them up). Sometimes it takes a while, such as with A Game of Thrones, the novel that a friend had been bugging me to read for months some time around 2004, and when I finally started, it took quite a while for me to like it (I've re-read it several times now, and it still takes a while). Several Neil Gaiman novels have the same effect. Other novels you can't really appreciate until you've finished them, and then you have to go back and re-read them. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was one of those for me, and The Remains of the Day too.
It makes me wonder whether everyone experiences these 'read-on' moments, and whether they're actually the same moments for everyone. And are they really the moments an author was fully confident that their story was going to work, or are they imposed upon the novel by the reader?
With my next new novel, not sure which one it's going to be, but I'll try to pick a good one, I'm going to try and keep track of this. I still have to finish reading about the 100-year-old first, although that does not seem like such a problem anymore now.