Teaser Tuesdays – The English Patient

This is how the English patient chides his nurse when she reads Kim by Rudyard Kipling a little too fast.

Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses.

He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did.

Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first paragraph it is otherwise.

~ The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

I suspect that he is indirectly telling me that I should also read this book slowly and I am following his advice, taking it nice and slow.

Update: I finished this book during the weekend, and my review is already up here. Overall, this is a moody book, and you need to take the time to get it. I liked the book but found certain portions quite dull. Beautiful writing though! Tons of it, and I really should have featured more quotes in my blog.

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!