My reading of Possession continues. But as I mentioned in my previous post, I'm being stalled by the typeface. Last week it was tiny font, which this book as plenty of. But to make matters worse, the last chapter I finished, some 55 pages, was almost entirely in italics.
The chapter in question contains a series of letters written between two lovers in 1859. I'm not sure why a letter has to be in italics; it's obvious it's a letter that we're reading, there is no need to differentiate it from the rest of the text. And of course the font is smaller than the rest of the book as well. So I had the grueling task of reading 55 pages of tiny italicized font.
To add to this, I was basically reading about what somebody else was reading. For whatever reason, I've always found this incredibly tedious. If it's a line or two, there doesn't seem to be a problem, but when it's page after page after page, I find my attention drifting, wondering if I really need to read all of this. Through the first 69 books on this list, this particular chapter was the closest I've come to skipping ahead a few pages, and that includes Lord of the Rings. Fortunately I was able to resist the temptation, saving myself from having to one day proclaim "I've read through Time magazine's list of 100 All-Time Novels, save a few pages of Possession."
For now, it looks like I'm through with italics and tiny font, but I have moved on to reading about somebody reading somebody else's diary. But I've passed the halfway point, so I have that going for me.
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