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Reading Slothfully
I was told in elementary school that I only could read at half the speed for success in college. Oh well, one benefit of slow reading is you get to live with the characters a longer period of time. I read in a vain attempt to better understand people. At my other homes, I'm known as a spouse, pop, guy in the choir, physical chemist, computer/web dilettante and child-care provider. In theory, I'm a published author, if you consider stuff like Quenching Cross Sections for Electronic Energy Transfer Reactions Between Metastable Argon Atoms and Noble Gases and Small Molecules to count as publications. I've strewn dozens of such fascinating things to the winds.
Currently reading
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas
The Spirit of the Border
Ramona the Brave (Ramona, #3)
The Underground Man (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard)
Delilah of the Snows
Mrs. Miniver
Betsy-Tacy Treasury (P.S.)
A Christmas Carol
The Way Some People Die
Envy of Angels
The Adventures of Roderick Random (Oxford World's Classics)
God was this tedious. I suppose if one were an English Lit. major and wanted to delve back into the beginnings of novel writing, this might be an ok place to begin. But if you're just an ordinary person looking for a GoodRead, this book is not likely to satisfy you. The writing style is long-winded and archaic (albeit not so archaic as Shakespeare or Chaucer). The story line, such as it is, is meandering and rather pointless. It seems that one Roderick Random suffers an almost endless series of misfortunes, most of which are caused by his own fecklessness, but all ends up well in the end thanks to the smiling face of Divine Providence, or something.
The reason I read this book was because it was one of the books that David Copperfield read to the inmates of the school where he landed. Sometimes, getting ideas for other books to read from literature works out as did my having read The Winning of Barbara Worth , thanks to a tip in The Grapes of Wrath . But, as in this case, it led to an unpleasant experience I should best be advised to forget as soon as possible.
 - Tobias Smollett, Paul-Gabriel Bouce)