Spritz, Part 3

Spritzing, as I've mentioned in my two previous blogs on the subject, is using a special program to speed read.  A 10-hour audiobook is equivalent to a 6-hour read or a 2-to-2.5-hour Spritz at a comfortable speed of 550 w/m.  I've Spritzed books at 600 or 700+ w/m and still understood them, but I enjoy them more and remember more at 550 w/m.  Here's what I've Spritzed in the week since my last Spritz entry:

• Post Office by Charles Bukowski
• The Giver by Lowis Lowry
• Gathering Blue by Lowis Lowry
• The Messenger by Lowis Lowry
• The People of Sparks by Jean DuPrau
• Snow Angels by James Thompson

I also read most of Hell Is Empty by Craig Johnson on audiobook, and I've Spritzed some of the stories from Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut and a small chunk of Lucifer's Tears by James Thompson.   

The highlights of the week are Snow Angels, Hell Is Empty, and The Giver.  Post Office was good, and the rest were rather mediocre.  In particular, the sequels to The Giver had nothing of the original's wit, imagination, and sci-fi sensibilities.  The People of Sparks is only marginally better, and not because the original story was better.  Sequels are only better in rare instances outside of the world of video games.

The Craig Johnson and James Thompson books I would call series rather than sequels, and they're both great.  I was a little sad to see Lucifer's Tears give up the Arctic setting of Snow Angels for Helsinki, but a big mistake the Wallander series has made is making all these weird murders take place in a small town in Sweden.  Maybe there's corruption of some sort in the water authority, like in Flint, Michigan.  I will get back to Henning Mankell's series, perhaps this week.  But series are different than sequels.  Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is a book in a series.  Bride of Frankenstein, however superior it might be to the original, is a sequel.  There is no fine line between the two, and I may be elitist for saying that there is even a differentiation between the two. Mark Twain famously wanted to make money off the Tom Sawyer franchise, and he wrote a sequel to it which turned out to be one of the greatest books in the English language, Huckleberry Finn.  

And like before, Spritzing is tiring.  I Spritzed for three hours yesterday, read a single-issue comic, and listened to audiobooks for almost two hours; I took a three-hour nap today.  It's well into the afternoon, and all I've read today is an issue or so of JLA.  My Wednesday comic books lie on the bed, untouched.  Strangely enough, I've found Spritzing less stressful than reading comic books, less energy consuming.  Part of that is that I've reviewed every comic book I've read for the past two or two-and-a-half years, while I read novels purely for pleasure.