I admit that I started and left unfinished Moon Over Manifest until after it won the Newbery at which point I returned to it and read it with pleasure. On my first go-round, like some others, I’d found it a bit too languid and easy to put down and not pick up again. Now having just read Laura Miller on the amount of description in novels I’m wondering if that was what caused me to lose interest. Or is it a taste thing? Miller references David Wroblewski’s The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, a book I definitely found had too much description for me to stick with it. I thought it was just me, but is it? There are books where I love the world building (the Harry Potter series comes to mind) and the more description the better, but there are other books where it just gets a bit too tedious for me. For example, I finally have put aside Salman Rushdie’s Luka and the Fire of Life unfinished for the time being. I had enjoyed his first children’s book (and several of his adult books) and so dived in feeling delighted to be in that familiar world building, filled with wild imagery and language. But then I’d tire of it and was unable to sustain interest.
There is occasionally complaining about the bulk of some children’s books and the suggestion that they would have benefited by page culling. Is that because there was too much description? Or something else?
educating alice 