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Please, mom, just one more chapter?
I have the new Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment. I haven't started it yet; maybe tonight or at the weekend. I'm looking forward to it, but at the same time, I know that reading it will be exhausting.
You see, Pratchett doesn't use chapter breaks.
That is, of course, his prerogative, but I really wish he would use them because I find that otherwise, reading his books is tiring. Chapter breaks give the reader a bit of a psychological break. It's a cue that you should maybe look up, take a breath, and see what time it is. It gives you some relief from tension. Without those chapter breaks, I feel somewhat anxious as I read and I read far longer than I mean too, simply because I'm waiting to get to the place where I can stop.
It's also quite fatiguing to read a book, even with chapter breaks, where all the action takes place during a single day or evening. When the POV character does not get to take a break and sleep and start a new day, I don't get that break either. The tension does not relax and I don't relax either.
Reading can be hard work.
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I find with books like that, I'll put down and I won't know where I'm up to when I pick them back up again. I tried it with Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. It's just a day in her life I think, and she internally rambles on about anything and everything and there's no chapter breaks, so I've got no clue what's happening.
I found OotP the most fatiguing out of all books to read. I don't know what it was. Maybe it was the 'must finish, must finish' nature of the beast, or the relentless pain that Harry had to go through, or the fact I was thinking about other things the whole time, fandom, characters, 'who the hell is going to die', 'where the hell is the plot' etc.
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I found that too, the first time through. But I think that was because I was reading it in intense fan-mode, racing through to see what happened, and highly concerned about what JKR might do to my characters.
It felt like I was watching a new Buffy episode, not reading a book.
Subsequent 1.5 re-reads have been much less tiring and more like my usual reading experience.
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I'm not certain where the idea of chapters first crept in, although I suspect it came from the Victorian system of serials, since the ordinary reader probably couldn't afford to buy books, and most books were "crabbedly writ and damnably long". Dickens' books are so long because he was paid by the word.
My understanding regarding chapters is that they're supposed to break at an exciting point, thus causing the reader to quickly turn the next page and continue reading. I've always felt, though, as you say, that there should be a point of rest, for the reader and the character, and then you move on to the next item.
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And I've never been able to read Dickens. Maybe if he were posting on ff.n as a WIP I'd have better luck. *g*
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Oddly enough, in all the years I've been reading Pratchett I never noticed the lack of chapters breaks before. I finally went and looked at the books of Pratchett's that I have (gifts given to me for Christmas and birthdays) and discovered that you are absolutely right! There are no chapter breaks. There is one exception: "The Amazing Maurice and His Legendary Rodents" has chapter breaks.
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(Hmm, adult novels sounds saucy! I would dearly love to read a saucy Pratchett novel.)
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