After discovering the wacky coincidence that I am, at the same time as Heather, making my way slowly through White Teeth, I thought I should add my thoughts. Judging by the receipt sticking out of the copy I saw laying on her desk, I’d say my green Shakespeare & Co. bookmark is a little further in. I wouldn’t call it a half-read (or a quarter-read) for me, but I’ve been reading it in segments of about 10 pages at a time on my commute, which might make authors and literature connoisseurs everywhere cringe. I won’t spoil it, and I don’t know how the plot resolves, but everything does seem to be spiraling out of control as Heather fears. Only, much of the trouble is caused by those characters that do have more in common than Archie and Samad–their children, born and raised together in London (and Samad’s are twins), and other middle-class British citizens.

Not as much of a half-reader as Heather or Joe Queenan (as he revealed in an essay in the New York Times book review), I tend to be a plan-to-reader. The stacks of books on my nightstand aren’t yet started (like Smith’s second, On Beauty, reviewed in LJ more than one year ago), but I look at them fondly, read the jacket, and can’t wait to start them, once I finish… But now I’m working on finishing White Teeth, planning to get back to Programming the Universe, and starting a new one for LJ. This job may turn me into a half-reader yet, and perhaps all of you who have resorted to marking your page with receipts and other odd scraps of paper–all of your bookmarks occupied marking pages in 10 different books–have the better of readers’ ailments.