This was a book group assignment, author is from Pakistan.
I got to almost the two hour mark, with almost 8 hours left to go, and simply stopped.
It was an utter waste of time for me. I was not enjoying it. I could not retain it. There was too much history. There were too many names and dates and places that meant little to nothing to me.
I had increased the speed to 1.25 which helped a lot. The author’s voice still sounded normal to me, the picked up pace helped brighten the book. But I still could not do it.
I had a very creative solution - I switched to the children’s version.
I enjoyed it, I understood it, it had almost no history, it was simply her story told in a very straightforward manner.
It was not read by the author, but the speech was still very slow, I increased it to 1.30 and the voice still sounded normal.
I finished the simple version, easily, on time for my discussion meeting.
No one laughed at me for reading the simple version.
