Reader’s Block

I have never been accused of being a slow reader… I’m not as speedy as my mom, who took a class in speed reading as a teenager (who does that?). However, I am competent in finishing a book in good time. I read all three of the Hunger Games book in 5 days and all the Harry Potter books in a month… I mean, come on they are gigantic!

But anyway, my average time for one good generic novel is approximately four days. So why is it that this one book has taken me almost 5 months to read and this is my 3^rd restart in the past year! Sometimes I wonder if pages are magically added to the end as I go along.

The novel, The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, is engaging, adventurous, mysterious and romantic. All the boxes are checked for the ‘What Makes a Good Novel’ List. So why has it taken me so long to finish?

Set in the 1960’s, the story is of a young woman who finds an old book containing ties to Vlad Dracula in her father’s library which, in turn, causes him to have to recant his dangerous past to her so she will understand the danger attached to the mysterious book. Along the way, you get both the father’s compelling backstory of his search for his captured professor and the daughter’s present search for her father, who has gone missing. All while the danger of vampires and Soviet governments are looming overhead.

This sounds like a good read right?! I am really not sure why it is taking me so long to get into this particular story… It may be that it is written very similarly to my freshman college history book. Or that very letter or article that the scholarly characters come across is written out word for word for the reader.

Basically there is no resolution or moral to the story of this particular post… and I am still not sure if I will ever finish the book.