It was bound to happen sooner or later with some book: I got 170 pages into Rats and Gargoyles and just... stopped... reading it. I carried it around for a few days without making any progress and then I switched bags and it didn't make the trip and then I realized it had been a week, at least, since I'd read any more in R&G. This will not do -- we have a goal, we have schedules to meet, people. People I respect recommended this book, so I think I'll assume that Mary Gentle's style is too subtle for me. (But absent that context, I'd just call it vague -- I'd find myself re-reading whole pages trying to figure out what, exactly, was happening.) It's always a hard decision for me to just abandon a book, but the harder thing to do and the right thing to do are usually the same thing.
So, to get back on the horse, so to speak, I grabbed a mystery that I'd found on the free table at work sometime back, Symptoms of Death, by Paula Paul, and knocked it out in two train rides. Hmp -- pretty standard Victorian-England-set mystery fluff. I'm going to go throw it back on the free table.
