Books That Take Forever to Read

These days, without the deadline pressure of the clubs, I'm reading fewer SFF books, and reading them more slowly. (On the positive side, I'm also reading fewer books that I dislike, and have stopped entirely doing the efficient but dull "read the first hundred manuscript pages, poke through the middle, and read the last hundred pages" thing.)

And that means that when I hit a really long book, it can jam up the supply chain for ages. For example, this morning I finally finished Reaper's Gale, which will still be the new "Malazan Book of the Fallen" book from Steven Erikson for about another two weeks. I started reading it on May 4th, on my way down to Sales Meeting.

I'll admit, I did put it aside for the two weeks of mid-May, but I've been reading this thing steadily for three whole weeks, and that's a ridiculously long time for me to be in the middle of one book. Part of the reason for that is that I had no deadline, and part of it was that it was so damn long -- I've said before that I read shorter books more quickly, because I can see the end coming up -- and part is because I'm also reading so many comics for ComicMix and here.

But, still, six weeks on one book! I'm appalled at myself. I'll have to see if I can knock off three novels next week to make up for it.