Saturday, August 23, 2014

Slow Starts

My reading of Reginald Hill's The Stranger House has been interrupted by the demands of the Toad, work quite a bit so I'm happy to report I'm now a quarter way and going strong. It's not one of his Dalziel and Pascoe books and I suppose I needed to make a bit of an effort to familiarise myself with the two young protagonists on offer in the early pages such that my reading didn't exactly flow but I now find I really want to know what happens next.

Something similar happened to me reading Peter Straub's A Dark Matter. It turned out to be great fun in the end, crazy gothic like Stephen King on amphetamines, but I wasn't entirely sure of its demands initially. Where would a reader be who wasn't keenly aware of the idea of delayed gratification? I suppose not a reader at all.

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