I just read a very good book. It was about an old woman who dreamed she was a young woman, who wanted a pony.
[spoiler follows]
She did get the pony.
[/spoiler]
The book is called Cyteen, by C.J.Cherryh. I don't think I can accurately describe it, but here's my attempt: It's a story about genetics, psychology, immortality and family. It's also a murder mystery which doesn't get answered until the very end, and even then it's unclear whether it got answered. The setting is science fiction, and mainly around the planet Cyteen, the third large world settled by humanity. I should also note, the book is about 700 pages long, and while I can normally finish a 400 page book in a few hours, this one I ended up reading over three days, and much more time. L asked what it was that made it relatively slow to read, but I really don't know. I'm not very good at analyzing that sort of thing while reading, I just observed in between reading that it was taking a lot longer.
Oh, and the opening paragraph is true about this book. It's not the whole story, but it's the one where I was hopping up and down, excited when it looked like she might actually get the pony. :)
5 comments:
Ah, one of my favorite books. A good summary.
Only three days?! I feel like a reallllly sloooow reader now....
I wouldn't compare your reading speed to mine, really. I'm usually an extremely fast reader, but I don't retain a lot of information until the second or third time I've read a fiction book. Most people I know who read slower also remember a lot more about the book, equivalent to me having read it several times. So it's a trade-off, not a particularly good or bad quality. I just thought it was interesting that for this book, I couldn't read it at my usual rate.
That books sounds extremely good! The description sounds like a good Connie Willis book or something (I've never read anything by C.J. Cherryh). I'll have to walk over to the very convenient library and see if they have it.
Mom, don't feel bad about reading slow! You are one of the smartest people I know so your reading speed can't be directly connected to intelligence or worth. I read fiction pretty quickly but in a couple catagories. The "mind candy" novels I read go by really fast. The more intellectual novels or complex science fiction, such as Connie Willis and Ann Patchett, take longer. Classics can take awhile but I love them. Non-fiction is considerably slower as seen on my Goodreads account.
It's interesting that you noticed your reading speed changing because it made me think about how fast I read things. I think one of the reasons it may have taken longer is there may have been more to think about while reading. That's just a guess but the "genetics, psychology, immortality, and family" part of your post made it sound more philosophically and intellectually stimulating than average books. I'll let you know if I agree when I read it.
I'll post about the slow reading thing over on my log -- it's getting too long to put as a comment here :-)
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