What I'm Reading to Mom

So I'm in the middle of reading a book to mom and this, as I've stated before, is weird to me. I am in the habit of reading a couple hundred pages a sitting and perhaps skimming a bit here and there if the author starts to go off on a descriptive tangent. Just not interested in how the roses were like poodles or in every detail of the room our protagonist will spend all of 2 paragraphs in. Life is too short and I have many more books waiting to be read. (As yet I don't own all these books but I know they are there in the abstract). So reading a chapter here or a half hour there, out loud, slows the process down. It is the first time in my life I've been working on a book for more than a couple of days. It's been over a month what with days off and mom going to Vegas. So in my mind the story is still progressing but I'm not really sure how it will end. I'm still speculating.

Anyway the book, Lost, is the third I've read by Gregory Maguire. So far I'm just not as pleased with it as I've been with my other forays into Maguire's imagination. The main character keeps slipping between a sort of British way of speaking / thinking and possibly some sort of east cost plain old American and I buy neither. In Wicked and Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister the setting is fantastic and the language fits naturally. I'm two hundred pages into Lost and the main character has me conflicted. I still don't know if she is crazy or haunted and she keeps slipping into a book that she herself is writing. So when I'm reading this aloud I have to stop and explain to mom that the author is using a visual technique to indicate that the character is either writing or thinking in terms of her novel or just going crazy. It stops the flow and doesn't lend itself to public reading. So half way in I gotta say: I just hope it gets better.

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