Aside | A book abandoned… temporarily!

I started reading Then We Came to the End last week and at first I really enjoyed it – it’s about an office and the things that happen on a daily basis – I could relate to some of the tales, and at one point was laughing out loud with tears running down my cheeks in the break out area at work.

Then it just wasn’t working for me anymore…

This weekend I haven’t read at all – which is weird since I’ve had my nose in a book at any opportunity this year. Saturday was the warmest day of the year so far – and instead of dragging a chair and a book into the garden, I found myself on the sofa catching up on all the TV I’ve missed these past few weeks when a book has tempted me instead.

I gave the book another shot at lunch today but I just can’t see where it’s going… so I’ve decided that I am going to have to abandon it *eek* I’m going to try something else and then come back to it – just so I can be sure I gave it a good chance!

So I’m moving onto my tl;dr challenge – and picking up March by Geraldine Brooks. I’ve read some great reviews so I’m hoping this will dig me out of my rut!

Natural breaks

As I was reading Then We Came to the End today I noticed that it has no natural breaks, it just seems to be endless pages of sentences – which got me thinking…I like books with natural breaks. By that I mean short chapters, or sections within chapters.

Take Nineteen Minutes for example – Picoult covers the thoughts of several characters in each chapter and you can clearly see by the use of a double line break where a natural break in the story is. So if you have just five minutes left at the end of your lunch break you think “I have time to read more, I can get through one or two of these sections and not have to leave in the middle of something”. Other books, like the one I just abandoned, have endless pages of solid text, so you think “well I might as well go back to my desk early as I’ve reached the end of a chapter and I don’t want to start another or I’ll have to stop in the middle”.

Does that make any kind of sense? Books with natural breaks get read much more quickly as I don’t have to put them down at the end of a chapter! What about you? Do you like to stop mid-chapter, or do natural breaks not bother you as you like to read whole chapters at once?