A friend had warned me that I would grow tired of it before it was over. I scoffed at the notion – at page 200 I was still enthralled with the Dickensian atmosphere of ‘An Instance of the Fingerpost’ by Iain Pears, and loving the historical world of Restoration England in the 1600’s. Yet he insisted that I would soon find the book unnecessarily long. I fought him for a bit, then let it go, content with the knowledge that if I was enjoying a book a few hundred pages in, I wouldn’t find it tough to finish in the least. Then I looked forward to composing a snotty little told-you-so message proving myself right for the cajillionth time.
As it turns out, by page 400 I was starting to wonder if I might be wrong. And by the time the FOURTH narrator began his take on the tale, I had to admit defeat. It was getting difficult to trudge through the last couple of hundred pages. But I did it, even if it took me three times longer than it normally does to finish a book. This post is dedicated to James, who was right when I was wrong ~ which happened at just about the 500 page mark as he had predicted. (And essential component of growing up is learning how to accept when you’re wrong. Perhaps there is hope for me after all.)
