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Tuesday, February 3, 2009

never drink orange juice after brushing your teeth

I think one has to be a bit careful about the order in which books are read. There are two components to this. The first is timing; timing is important. I think I loved The Frozen Thames so much partially because it is an ice book, and it is an icy time of year. The other is order in which books are read; like toothpaste and orange juice, some just don't go properly one after the other, when they might be perfectly fine on their own.

I started to read Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen right after finishing The Wee Free Men. It's a book about gardens and magic, and I badly want to like it, and it just fell really flat. Painfully, disappointingly so. I started reading it, and thought, "I have to stop. I don't want to dislike this book." It had two counts against it: winter is a rotten time for reading books about wonderful gardens (because I can't quite remember what a garden feels like when there's two feet of snow on the ground); and Terry Pratchett is so brilliant and incisive and careful with his words. Reading Addison Allen immediately after Pratchett didn't show Addison Allen in the best light.

It's not that I thought it was bad. It just didn't quite grab my attention in the way I had hoped, and I don't blame the author. I think it was just bad planning on my part.

Instead of Garden Spells, I moved on to an old favourite: Elizabeth Berg's Range of Motion. This is a comfort book for me, and I was needing some comfort after having to put down a book I was really looking forward to. Review is coming up.

2 comments:

Jill said...

I know exactly what you mean! The Wee Free Men is certainly an almost impossible act to follow!

Unknown said...

What I really should have done was taken an extended break from reading anything, all the better to let The Wee Free Men sink in better... but that's not really something I can do so much!