Saturday, January 14, 2017

Post from a train

I'm somewhere in southern North Carolina. We'll be in South Carolina fairly soon. Hopefully I'll be asleep by then. I can just start reading Jonathan Syrange & Mr. Norrell if I have much trouble getting to sleep. All the years of avoiding this book were well spent. I keep waiting for something to happen. It just keeps dragging on. I can make myself get in 30 pages or so but it's a struggle to read much past that. I'm fearing a Fellowship of the Rings situation brewing. Just because loads of other people love a certain book is no guarantee that it will be something I enjoy with the same fervor. It's not a bad book. I will keep reading it, but it's so long.

Maybe I will have a repeat of my latest audiobook experience. I nearly bailed on Asimov's Amongst the Gods, but I stuck with it. The middle section was a huge drag. It had a fun ending that made the tedium of the section worth the slog through multiple sections switching between three different characters. The third section really saved the book. It tied everything together and was brisk and engaging. It wasn't exactly my kind of book, but I can recognize excellent work when it doesn't resonate with my taste. I'm hoping Jonathan Strange will reward my effort in a similar fashion. Dickens books always take forever to build and end in a flourish that makes the previous hundreds of pages worth the effort. Jonathan Steange has Dickensian aspirations. Perhaps those aspirations will be realized in the end.


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