Booking it eternally

From Booking Through Thursday:

What book took you the longest to read, and do you feel it was the content or just the length that made it so?

Wow, I haven’t booked for a while, and this is a fun question.

The first really long book I read was Gone With The Wind. I was maybe twelve at the time and I remember taking at least one break part way through to read a few shorter novels. Because the book is long, and Scarlett, kind of annoying. I’m really not all that wild about Rhett either.

In college, I booked through both Anna Karenina (long) and War and Peace (longer) relatively quickly. Maybe because there was going to be a test. Tolstoy fun fact: the man did know how to write a short story. Really.

More recently, I read the first two books in the fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin. I’m still tired from that. I read these on Kindle and I was all:

29%? How can I still be at 29%? I’ve been reading for hours.

Will I continue the series? Maybe. When I’m in the mood for epic fantasy and don’t mind seeing all my favorite characters killed off. I think it’s this last bit that keeps me away. Not that I think authors should never kill off their characters. It’s that I don’t trust Martin. I don’t want to get attached to anyone in the series, so I keep all the characters at arm’s length–which is no way to read a book.

As I mentioned, epic fantasy is a mood read for me. Now I need to add epic fantasy where I don’t mind all my favorite characters dying and the books are really, really long, kind of like the literary equivalent of running a marathon. 

That’s a very specific sort of mood. It may be a while before I pick up book three.