Breaking with past practice and stopping reading a book after one day

I'm going to break with past practice and stop reading a novel I started with after just one day's reading. I go through about 60 pp. (4 chapters, about 20 percent of the novel) in Domenic Smith's The Electric Hotel and can see that this novel is really good for the right reader but I'm not that reader. It's a work of pseudo-historical fiction - a detailed examination of the early days of film and through the silent era - focused on a (fictional) French director who began by working w/ the (real) Lumiere bros. and eventually did one great silent feature and then dropped from sight; the story picks up w/ a film grad student who discovers that this director is living in a sort of retirement hotel, once a grand place in the silent era (I think it's based on the Roosevelt Hotel) and begins interviewing him and encouraging him to preserve some of his works, all of which he has kept in canisters in his tiny apartment. Smith's writing is fine, rich w/ detail, perhaps overly so, but for me it's lacking in plot and in conflict and feels all too schematic. For many readers, that's just fine, and it reminds me in particular of the highly successful All the Light You Cannot See, but that was another book that I just couldn't finish. I found myself skimming for plot, and the plot wasn't there. If I were to want to learn about a historical era or a historical figure, hands down I would seek a good biography or a nonfiction history. So rather than belabor this point, I will move on to another novel, but not without recognizing the strength of this book for some, perhaps most?, readers.