…i've Had A Bad Week." What's Happened?"

I Never Mind The Accusations Of Domesticity, As Long As People Recognise That All Of Us, Even The Luckiest, Will Live Lives In Which We Have Our Hearts Broken, Suffer The Loss Of Loved Ones, Worry Ourselves Half To Death About Our Kids.

No Time Spent With A Book Is Ever Entirely Wasted, Even If The Experience Is Not A Happy One: There’s Always Something To Be Learned. It’s Just That, Every Now And Again, You Can Hit A Patch Of Reading That Makes You Feel As If You’re Pootling About. [...] But What Can You Do About It? We Don’t Choose To Waste Our Reading Time; It Just Happens. The Books Let Us Down.

I Lost The Plot For A While Then. And I Lost The Subplot, The Script, The Soundtrack, The Intermission, My Popcorn, The Credits, And The Exit Sign.

She Was Trying To Say Something Else; She Was Trying To Say That The Inability To Articulate What One Feels In Any Satisfactory Way Is One Of Our Enduring Tragedies. It Wouldn't Have Been Much, And It Wouldn't Have Been Useful, But It Would Have Been Something That Reflected The Gravity And The Sadness Inside Her. Instead, She Had Snapped At Him For Being A Loser. It Was As If She Were Trying To Find A Handhold On The Boulder Of Her Feelings, And Had Merely Ended Up With Grit Under Her Nails.

So This Is Supposed To Be About The How, And When, And Why, And What Of Reading -- About The Way That, When Reading Is Going Well, One Book Leads To Another And To Another, A Paper Trail Of Theme And Meaning; And How, When It's Going Badly, When Books Don't Stick Or Take, When Your Mood And The Mood Of The Book Are Fighting Like Cats, You'd Rather Do Anything But Attempt The Next Paragraph, Or Reread The Last One For The Tenth Time.