Summer Kittens: Part 2

I'm in way over my head here.

I'm supposed to be reading a page of The Little Kittens and the Gumdrop Garden by Norris Squee every day. For those of you who a) didn't read the last post and b) are too lazy to scroll down, I'm doing this in order to finish the book by the end of summer and get the same feeling that the people reading the 1000+ pages of Infinite Jest over the summer must feel.

But it's hard going.

The first page almost finished me off. I lost count of the number of times I had to read it in order to understand it fully. From what I can gather (and the depth of meaning here has left me with the impression that I'm missing some layers of interpretation), there were some kittens. And these kittens were little.

I will confess. This blew my mind. I was thinking that maybe I would be able to read more than one page on the first day, and possibly get ahead of myself, giving me some leeway. But now I see that this was optimistic bravado. I couldn't get my head to understand this first page, and I had to lie down. This could also have been partly due to the pictures in the book; many of them have so many colours that looking at them for any length of time is like pressing my eyes into an LSD-laced box of rainbows.

God, we haven't even entered the gumdrop garden, and I'm already thinking I've bitten off more than I can chew. I need a rest.

Summer Kittens: Part 1

I just discovered the website Infinite Summer. It's basically a project in which people try to read David Foster Wallace's epic novel, Infinite Jest, in one summer. At more than a thousand pages long, the book is apparently the ninth longest in the English language. It also has copious endnotes, and contains massively long sentences and words you've never heard of and have to look up if you're going to understand. Because of this, the 75 pages per week needed to get through the book over three months is pretty heavy going, even for those crazy people who can read entire novels in a weekend.

I would quite like to read Infinite Jest, but I've come in too late to really attempt to it before the end of summer. However, I do like the idea of blogging my findings as I go through a book, so I've decided to try another work instead.

Before the summer is out, I, the Imaginary Reviewer, hereby proclaim that I will have read The Little Kittens and the Gumdrop Garden by Norris Squee, before the end of summer. That's sixteen pages, all of which I have to have read before September 22, a rate of one page per day.

It's a big task, but I'm pretty sure I'm up to it. I'll post regular updates here if I can manage to fit that in between reading. Wish me luck!