That said, I'm reminded why I was so enchanted by it first time- the conceit with the bicycles, since back then I'd only just learned to ride a bike myself and thought bicycles the best thing in the world. But the bicycle conceit can be reduced to a one-liner and the rest of the book is slow once it's happened.
Maybe this shallowness is the brain-rot of age or the brain-rot of the internet. Maybe I'd find all my quondem door-stopper favourites impossible now. Tristam Shandy? Look Homeward, Angel? I note that one of my childhood favourites, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, is also impossible. Genre or epistolary novels are all I want to read these days.
