For the past several months, I have been working on both “Minders of Make-Believe” and “Fortress of Solitude”. Neither one is what I had been hoping for, and both are proving to be much slower than I had wished.

I think I thought “Minders…” was going to be literary analysis, why the people who decide what “classics” are choose what they do. Instead, it’s a very dry history of “who’s who” in children’s literature. Which, I guess, is all new information to me, and good to know. But not what I had in mind.

“Fortress…” came heavily recommended. But nearly a third of the way into it, and it’s still not going anywhere. And not in a “going somewhere, but I don’t know what it is or why” sort of way, but in a snotty lit-trit-chure fashion where the point seems to be that it’s not going anywhere at all, that life is ust a futile series of incidents without much direction on the protagonist’s part. And… well… I’m over it. That’s not how I live my life, and I’m entirely bored with reading that kind of story, as well.

So I’ll finish both of them. But hopefully the rest of the list will go faster again, once I get through this slow and painful selection of readings. Better luck next year picking titles, I guess.