A couple entries ago I discussed the pain of reading Catch 22 by Joseph Heller. It was so much pain and torture that I decided to switch things up, and just to make things interesting I decided to start reading The Poisonwood Bible a week before the in-class essay. I had not done any research on the book, because why would the length of a book I need to read quickly matter? So I downloaded the electronic copy of Barbara Kingsolver’s book and began on page 1 of a whopping 696. Because I’m a magnet, I ran some quick statistics on the pace I needed to read to finish on time: 99.4 pages per day, and given that I read at a 1.5 min/page rate for the text size that equates to 2.5 hours of reading per night, and over 17.5 hours in one week. That’s just cray. Ironically, my adventure reading this book last week paralleled the plot, maybe. Given that it’s way past my bedtime and I am half asleep right now anything could make sense to me. In The Poisonwood Bible, Nathan Price goes on a mission trip to the Congo and desires to baptize the town’s children. He is so myopic on this goal that he loses sight of understanding the African culture and the whole thing is a bust, leading to his death at the end. Likewise, my experience reading this book was all about finishing it, getting to page 696. However my speed-reading technique inhibited my text-absorbing skills and I only partially comprehended the story. I would do it a tad differently if I had a redo, but I don’t so know I should be glad it’s over and hope my next book is the Tortoise and the Hare. That would be nice.
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