Thursday 29 September 2011

And I'm still ...

... reading Gormenghast.  It's really long.  It's a story about a castle and its occupants.  It could be told in probably ten chapters, but Mervyn Peake likes to draw things out and tell us many details about curtains and breezes and leaves and thoughts and whispers and noses and hairstyles and dresses and stones and books and rituals and coughs and graves and ribbons and attics and walls; things like that.

It's excellent, very good indeed.  No complaints from me at all.  I love it, love reading it; the words are put together in an astonishing way sometimes, and such vocabulary!  I wish I had such a lexicon at the ready.  But I've still got 400 pages to read.  I'm not bored of the book, but I'm just not used to spending so many weeks on one story.  It's taking a long time to read, because, although I've read a book of 900+ pages in less time than this, the words have been more widely spaced, seriously!  This book has more lines per page than your average book.  So whereas I might usually have a couple of minutes between page turns, I now have at least five.  I'm not complaining; I'm just saying; just incase you were wondering why I'm such a slow reader: I'm not; I'm a fast reader, usually.    (Last night I read some information, in New Hart's Rules, on commas and semicolons and I'm trying to see if I can use them correctly in order to spot their incorrect use when I'm proofreading!)

So that's all; for now.