Friday, July 24, 2015

I've started so I'll finish

Quick follow-up on a couple of earlier posts:
  • I should have mentioned during the Pride And Prejudice review that this is another book that I bought many many years ago (25 years plus, I should think) and once started reading but never finished. Previous books in that category on this list are On The Road, Good As Gold and The Unbearable Lightness Of Being - I really should have remembered Pride And Prejudice since I specifically mentioned it in a couple of those earlier reviews. My recollection is that I made a decent start on it, maybe getting somewhere between a quarter and a third of the way through, and the abandonment wasn't because I wasn't enjoying it, but more likely because something like a new Dick Francis or Stephen King paperback came out and distracted me and I never quite got round to going back to it. These days I have put away the capriciousness of youth and am more ruthlessly self-disciplined in these areas, and I never start a novel until I've finished the previous one. I might have a fiction and a non-fiction book on the go at the same time, but never two fiction books. Well, I suppose maybe in exceptional circumstances like forgetting to take my current book with me when I'm away from home and having to get hold of something else to read, but not otherwise.
  • Similarly, I should have spotted that Solaris permits me to fill in a blank entry on this list of novels originally written in other languages, since it's the first one I can recollect reading that was originally written in Polish.

No comments: