When reading fiction, which passages make you slow down to read every word?
November 21, 2011 8:19 AM   Subscribe

When reading fiction, which passages make you slow down to read every word?

I've always noticed when I read fiction that some passages bore me to tears and others make me slow down to enjoy each ... and... every... word. For me it's anything to do with domestic detail. For some reason I'm riveted by anyone drinking a cup of tea or arranging flowers in a vase or making a meal...

How about you?
posted by Lorna to Media & Arts (5 answers total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: Chatfilter. -- cortex

 
I've read a number of books with scenes of melee combat: fistfights, swordplay, whatever. after blazing through the scene and forming a vague picture in my head of what the hell just happened, I find myself almost always going back to really figure out how the battle looked. Zelazny's The Chronicles of Amber is full of masterfully described swordfights, for instance.

Also, scenes of psychedelia -- Philip K. Dick, Robert Anton Wilson, William Gibson -- tend to get me to slow down.
posted by griphus at 8:24 AM on November 21, 2011


I always like reading detailed descriptions of what someone's wearing. Even better when there's an illustration to accompany it (like in older novels), so I can compare it to what I'm imagining.
posted by missix at 8:30 AM on November 21, 2011


Really complex or intricate passages will cause me to slow down my reading. But also poorly written and confusing ones, so it's not always a good thing. Generally, exciting books seem to speed up my reading.
posted by HFSH at 8:41 AM on November 21, 2011


Hunter Thompson does this thing where he'll switch from his normal sort of loose conversational voice that's easy to fly through to a tighter, introspective voice that's enumerating a very specific idea or argument, like the famous "high water mark" passage on Fear and Loathing. That makes me slow down.

Nick Cave('s novels), and some poets, like Seamus Heaney or Bukowski sometimes make me read them twice because I was paying attention to the sound and look of the words and not the meaning.
posted by cmoj at 8:47 AM on November 21, 2011 [1 favorite]


Descriptions (of settings, people, etc.) get me to slow down, because I need to concentrate to get the images to appear in my mind's eye.
posted by rabbitrabbit at 8:57 AM on November 21, 2011


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