Long road to the end of 2015

Every time I enter the under-the-roof cupboard where I keep my TBR stash, there is one pile of books that looks at me rather accusingly. This is the pile of those I pulled the front intending to read before end of this year. They’re  mixture of  titles remaining from my TBR Challenge and books I received last Christmas that I feel guilty I still have not read.

From the TBR Challenge I have:

The Sea,The Sea by Iris Murdoch
Dr Thorne by Anthony Trollope
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
Abyssinian Chronicles by Moses Isegawa
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

And on the Christmas gift pile I have:
The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan
Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink

I do want to read all of these. But most of them are big fat books. Nothing like the length of Vickram Seth’s A Suitable Boy which according to this infographic comes in at 593,000 words or Bleak House at 360,000 words. But they’re still rather sizeable. The Sea, The Sea is 560 pages  and Abyssinian Chronicles 512 pages (though the type is very small and dense). And that’s causing me to procrastinate and vacillate and end up choosing shorter works.

I don’t normally have any issues with novels over 500 pages long, sometimes they are my favourite reads because I can get fully absorbed the characters in a way that isn’t always possible with short novels. But right now I don’t feel I have the energy for the effort I suspect it will take.

I could of course just take the plunge and decide to make slow but steady progress by reading just one chapter a day. Or give myself a good talking to for being such a wimp. But dear readers, you may have a better strategy to recommend? Do tell me if you have any issues with longish reads and how you overcome them.