Reading On

I've made very little progress this week with The Duke's Children. Partly this was due to the excessive demands of the Toad, work, and partly because I hit a couple of chapters dealing with Silverbridge going hunting and couldn't get into the lingo at all. I think I'm right in saying that Trollope was a bit of a fan of the 'sport', and, unfortunately, it shows. Happily I managed to kick-start my reading today - partly helped along by Tregear having an accident whilst hunting which nicely got the plot moving again - and now I'm fairly racing along.

A few years ago a hiatus of this sort could threaten to derail my reading of a novel entirely, especially if encountered before the halfway mark, but I seem to have more staying power these days. But here's a related question: at what point in a period of inactivity related to reading a novel does it become a bit of a cheat to read on? My rule of thumb is two months, just about the time it takes me to forget salient details of plot completely.

Of course, said rule does not apply when working through a collection of poetry. That's why I could spend months on Muldoon's Maggot and still feel I'd genuinely read the volume from cover to cover in a real sequence. Just as a matter of interest, recent readings of a couple of previously unread Heaney's have been a lot quicker. Seeing Things, the most recent, took three days. Enjoyed most of the earlier poems, but didn't really get the long sequence that completes the collection. Must get back to it sometime soon.