The Subtle Knife

I had a unique experience yesterday in the early morning while laid on my bed reading. The book I was reading made me so terribly bewildered and angry, that I threw my kindle across the length of my bed in an unexpected rejection of it. At first I looked away from what I'd read in horror, frozen in shock as the gravity of the author's design crept up my spinal column and into my consciousness like a poison. Then came this involuntary action that span the kindle away, as if it might somehow help me to survive the realisation unfolding inside my head.

I'd just read something so utterly unacceptable that it genuinely pissed me right off.
"Fucking bastard!" I thought, imagining the author as he wrote this particularly offensive page.
"I don't believe that just happened. You can't do this, it's ridiculous and I can't accept it at all. Fuck you."

It took me 10 minutes of pacing around restlessly and then lying down listlessly clutching my pillow, to pick my book back up again and finish the page. As it turns out I was at the very end of the book. I read to the end and turned the kindle off, dazed, a more broken being after the experience.

Unfortunately I have to rate Philip Pullman's 'The Subtle Knife' a 10/10 for being a very compelling sequel to 'Northern Lights'. It's utterly heart wrenching at times, with the power to make me put my book down and cry horrible, ugly tears-and the power to make me put my book down and spit fire and curse as if you gave me a dragon's heart you sick bastard, you. I've even read it before, but I remembered nothing of the latter third of the book, most likely as a desperate survival measure that I've now unwittingly made redundant, I assume.