Pacing doesn't, to me at least, necessarily mean that the book has to move at a speedy, rapid pace. But the reading of it should go pretty smoothly. There's an author I read who has uneven pacing, in that there are sections where it's like slogging through sucking mud in flipflops that you really don't want to lose in sections, followed by sections that suck me in so thoroughly and are paced so well that I'm through them before I know it and back into the bog. Ironically, both these sections probably take physically as much time to read once I sit down to read. But it takes me longer to read the slogging bits because it becomes infinitely possible for me to put the book down and find other stuff to do. Despite the uneven pacing, I can't wait to read the next one.
Good pacing to me can even be a slow, deliberate book (George R.R. Martin's Song of Fire and Ice books are pretty darn deliberate - and enormously complicated so they require a lot of hard thinking while I'm reading them), but I still hate putting it down, and I can't wait to pick it back up.
I suppose, really, it's a pretty amorphous concept. I should never start thinking about these things this late at night!
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branchandroot
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Date: 2008-04-14 06:02 am (UTC)Good pacing to me can even be a slow, deliberate book (George R.R. Martin's Song of Fire and Ice books are pretty darn deliberate - and enormously complicated so they require a lot of hard thinking while I'm reading them), but I still hate putting it down, and I can't wait to pick it back up.
I suppose, really, it's a pretty amorphous concept. I should never start thinking about these things this late at night!