reducing the level of choice

Books As I explained inappropriately during my comments on The Reader, I'm currently in the process of deliberately reading more, forcing myself, to some extent, to pass my eyes across at least fifty pages per day of something on paper. To make things more interesting, I'm reducing the level of choice by making it the last book to enter my possession, at the moment The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, Rebecca Miller's novel about the secret past of a respectable woman living in a retirement home, which was a competition prize. 150 pages and counting. Two days to go.

With the exception of A Christmas Carol over the festive period, until I was trying to pick through Miller's words had I realise quite how long it had been since I'd read this kind of fiction. The book is written in a meticulous and direct style in which character descriptions are sneaked into action and doesn't have anything like the kind of story structure I'm now so used to now, and the dialogue mirrors reality rather than the exposition heavy paragraphs I've become used to either in non-fiction about Shakespeare or fiction that tends to feature timelords and TARDISes.

Is it possible for someone to become so used to that, one type of reading, and soon find anything else inaccessible? It's true that on a couple of events in the book have lent themselves to supernatural rather than rational explanations and I'll admit to forgetting momentarily the genre I was reading before glancing at the cover as a reminder. But with a few dozen pages I was being dragged along by Miller's compelling story, which though just on the edge of cliche, has become (to use one of my own) a page-turner. And that seems to have been the pattern across all of these books. I do have the capacity to look at horizons further afield.