After 153 pages, out of a 600+, I decided to stop reading this.
True enough, reading this has have been far from continuous. The Harry Potter series intervened, and there were some other books that begged for attention.
But it is not merely being "out" of the story and its characters that made me take this, quite uncommon, step. It simply doesn't really appeal to me.
It's a kind of Sheherezade story, in which The Senior, a very very old man, is just in time prevented from performing suicide after living for more than a 1000 years. He agrees to telling his story without murdering himself, for as long as he'll stay interested in the descendants that have revivded him.
The story becomes a framework for story-chapters in which he relates his travels and experiences. That's it, and it didn't keep me glued to the pages, it didn't even keep me mildly interested.
The writing style does not really appeal either. The characters tend to have very sharp tongues, but it becomes tiresome after a while. There is only so much smart remarks on one page one can take.
And the funny trap that almost every writer seems to fall for: particularly in a story like this which spans multiple centuries, the number of allusions and references to our time and place is much much higher than any other reference-count. It becomes too obvious it is written for our time, in our time by someone from our time.
