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I would like to pat myself on the back for not only finishing the first book since I declared my reading challenge, but for accidentally choosing the LONGEST book on the list to get started on my mission.  Three weeks into reading it, I was struck by how odd it was that the Kindle app told me I was only 60% finished.  Off to Amazon.com to check the page count...656.  For some reason that knowledge got me hyper-motivated, and I raced through the last 40%.

My final assessment: most books with that many pages are not worthy of their length, and Of Human Bondage suffers from the same downfall.  In my personal appraisal, many areas dragged and could have easily been edited out.  However, I am glad that I soldiered through the entire saga.  This book represented one of my favorite things about literature; it encompassed reflections of myself and my life.  Despite the fact that Maugham penned this novel in 1915, there are parts of the human experience that are applicable 100 years later.  And although many people may find his vocabulary choices pretentious or unnecessarily showy, I appreciated that I had to employ context clues and occasionally a dictionary to work through some words.

So, onwards and downwards (in terms of page quantity).  I think my next target will be under 300 pages.

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