In the interests of honesty and the ruination of profundity, I must confess: I have only just now finished reading Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke. Oops.
Back in February, I concluded a post about the book by positing two paths for my reading to take: that I would either toss the book aside entirely, or swallow it whole in the next few days. The path I did not mention, however, was the one I knew was most likely to come to pass: that by posting about my enjoyment of a book one-eighth of the way through it, I would be cursing myself into toiling through it for an extended period of time out of some sort of demented hyper-self-fulfilling prophecy.
It's funny, because I almost didn't publish that post, for that very reason. I thought that perhaps I should wait, save it for later. But hubris reared its ugly head; I was proud of my little post, of the use of language, of the earnestness; and so I tamped down the prickling sensation in the back of my mind and clicked.
Naturally, in response, the universe chuckled. You want to fall slowly? it asked. Well then. So you shall.
I've been falling through molasses ever since.
Not that Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is in any way a bad book. On the contrary, it's quite engaging across all the necessary planes of plot, characterizations, prose, and use of magic. Certainly, the voice is a little dry, as it stylistically mimics nineteenth-century texts, and I for some reason no longer have much of a tolerance for anything much older than a half-century. And certainly, the footnotes and their teeny font wreaked havoc on my eyes and my attention span, causing disruption where there would ordinarily have built up a consistent pace and flow. And yes, the book is very, very long.
Long, but good.
Which is why, after renewing it and renewing it from the library, and setting it aside for other, shinier books in the meantime, and then, upon picking at it a bit more, finally realizing the damned thing was too heavy to be read in a comfortable position anyway, I hiked back down to return it. Then I tracked it down on ebook, so I could continue reading on my Nook.
I read approximately a hundred pages more before, yet again, setting it aside for other books.
Yet I did not despair. I was determined; and so I put the audiobook onto my iPod, to which I could listen for the four to six hours a week I was going hiking.
Coincidentally, did you know that the hills where I live are very beautiful and verdant after the early spring rains, and demand to be enjoyed in the relative silence of birdsong after the distant gusts of traffic melt further and further away with each bend in the path? (Whew.) I did not.
It was around this point where I guiltily remembered that dreaded post I had made. Returning to it, I sighed, and removed the cover image I had included, as if that could detract all the attentions of my imaginary readership away from my bold declarations. As if that could somehow diminish my own sense of failure.
For a while, I didn't read much of anything at all, and hiked in natural ambiance.
And then, slowly, slowly, I fell again.
And kept going.
And between the past two days, while I spent roughly eight hours preparing freezer meals, gardening, and cleaning, I fell, and I listened, and my waning attention waxed until I realized just what it was that I had been missing.
It is a great pity that I could not have read the whole thing all at once, because those four hour chunks had me the most engaged I had been since the first one hundred printed pages. But then again, I suppose I should not have gotten quite so attached had finishing Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell not become such a thing of accomplishment.
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