Killing Time

Quite pleased to have got a fair amount of reading done in KL, despite having to tend to the recreational needs of our house guests. Made a bit of a mistake though in not taking the necessary tomes with me to continue the great-sonnet-read-through. I'm not stalled exactly as I've moved on a little in the last couple of days, but just one sonnet a day would have been possible in KL and would have moved me beyond 100 which would have felt like real progress. As it is I'm not quite there yet - and the ones in the 90s make tough reading at times. So knotty, they seem to deliberately tie-up the reader.

As to why I didn't take them along - I didn't think I would get through that much of what I did have with me, so I thought it would be wastefully ambitious to take what I needed to continue my systematic reading of the sonnets, and I was wrong. Case in point: I sailed through P.D. James's The Murder Room in a couple of days, which was unexpected as I'd tried to read it earlier in the year (a copy from the library) and simply not made progress beyond the first sixty pages. The experience of just not being able to get along with a work at one point and then finding it extremely straightforward at another is a salutary reminder of what a genuinely individual experience real reading is. It can't be forced, though it can be persevered with. I remember having the same problem with an earlier Dalgliesh, The Black Tower, at one time thinking it unreadable. I suppose the challenge James poses is that of demanding a certain level of concentration to enter into the often closed, claustrophobic worlds in which her murders take place. You've got to want to solve the mystery (even if you never really do), to actively participate in the act of detection, for the novels to make sense.

Of course, when you do cross that boundary into the world offered you find one of the best ways you'll ever find of killing time.