Since I started reading St. Augustine’s City of God, I’ve been using a multi-track reading strategy. City of God is for when I’m alert and awake, and bedtime reading goes to something easier, and Graham Greene is my preferred author at the moment (because I have a bunch of his books).
However, I’m having to abandon Ministry of Fear because it is simply too complex for me to handle in an exhausted state. Greene loves to throw in twists and and turns, especially in his “entertainments,” and I’ve lost track of what is happening. I need a book that’s more linear and I’m thinking of doing a re-read because the mental lift is even lighter.
I used to read one book at a time, and complexity helped me to unwind and get to sleep. I suppose it is a paradox that I no longer need much help to crash at the end of a busy day, and I often will skip several days, making it even harder to remember where I was in the narrative.
I will say that nonfiction is useful in this, because its very linear and I may already know something about the topic which helps me fill the gaps. When I was doing research for my books, I made a point of not using sources, because I might find a killer quote and be too tired to mark it.
I’d like to come back to it, because it seems very clever and it seems to capture the atmosphere of wartime London where raids still happen, but the tide has turned, though victory seems a long way off.
Like the Sword of Honour trilogy, it is a stark reminder that the American experience of WW II was very different than everyone else’s.
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