{"id":393,"date":"2007-03-13T07:00:39","date_gmt":"2007-03-13T06:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/wordpress\/?p=393"},"modified":"2007-03-13T07:00:39","modified_gmt":"2007-03-13T06:00:39","slug":"britains-unfinished-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=393","title":{"rendered":"Britain&#8217;s unfinished books"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A couple of weeks ago, I did <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/2007\/03\/world_book_day.html\">a blog posting<\/a> about Britain&#8217;s favourite books. This week, we have the results of <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/1\/hi\/entertainment\/6440981.stm\">a survey<\/a> of books which Britons buy but do not manage to finish reading.<br \/>\nIn fact, it&#8217;s a very rare experience for me not to finish a book &#8211; it&#8217;s partly that I usually know a fair bit about any book I obtain and partly because I&#8217;m a pretty committed reader. So I found that the lists in this new survey contained books that I have started and finished although, in some cases, I can understood why faint-hearted readers might have given up (mainly length, but sometimes complexity of structure or style).<br \/>\nIn the top five fiction books not finished, there were two that I&#8217;ve read: &#8220;Captain Corelli&#8217;s Mandolin&#8221; [my review <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/fbooks.html#Mandolin\">here<\/a>] and &#8220;Cloud Atlas&#8221; [my review <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/fbooks.html#CA\">here<\/a>]. In the top five non-fiction books not finished, again there were two that I&#8217;ve read: &#8220;Eats, Shoots And Leaves&#8221; [my review <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nfbooks.html#ESL\">here<\/a>] and &#8220;Wild Swans&#8221; [my review <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/biographies.html#WS\">here<\/a>].<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A couple of weeks ago, I did a blog posting about Britain&#8217;s favourite books. This week, we have the results of a survey of books which Britons buy but do not manage to finish reading. In fact, it&#8217;s a very rare experience for me not to finish a book &#8211; it&#8217;s partly that I usually [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cultural-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=393"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}