I’m almost finished with Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which I started sometime in late January. I can usually finish books fairly quick, even 800-page tomes, but life seems to have a lot more distractions lately. I need to take a week off and devote all my time to reading. But I digress. It’s an amazing book, melding fantasy with a masterful pastiche of the social criticism of Dickens or Thackeray. Clark’s descriptions of magic and magical places are poetic without being overwrought or flowery. And those footnotes! The amount of care and imagination she poured into those footnotes is impressive for its own sake, but they also add verisimilitude and texture to Clark’s alternate universe. But this book isn’t just for fantasy buffs. The story should appeal to anyone with a love for epic, sweeping fiction.
Next up, I think, will be David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. Hopefully, I can get through that one more quickly.
It was a fantastic book. It also took me longer to read than most others, but even after a few weeks getting through it I was disappointed when it was over. The footnotes were pretty cool, maybe not as much as Terry Pratchett or David Foster Wallace, but they did add an extra element of realism, along with the arcane spelling.
I know you haven’t finished it yet, but when you do, let me know if you feel the same as I did – that it ended in a bit of a rush. I’m not sure if that’s because it was so long and it had to end somehow, or it was the fact that the night I finished it I just *had* to keep reading so I read more than usual in that last evening.