I’ve had this book for longer than I can remember, and I haven’t read more than a hundred pages of it. At the beginning, it was a bit of a challenge; now it seems like an impossible slog. It’s not because it’s too long, because I’ve gone through The Count of Monte Cristo, which is even longer and it’s one of my favourite books. It’s just that it has generated more psychic mass the longer it’s stayed, unread, on my bookshelf. If you could project my mental representation of this book onto a wall, it would be twenty feet tall with muscly arms and, somehow, fangs. I’ve started reading it, and it’s not bad, but I just hate opening it up. It feels like it takes a great deal of effort just to open the front cover every time.

But I’ve started and I’m 23 pages in, and I hope to try and do a minimum of 10 pages a day, which would mean it would take me until about September to finish. So I guess I’ll check back in September? Hopefully before then, hopefully not later.