Reading to order

I don't like reading to order. I'm completely happy reading non-fiction with a highlighter pen, I've just finished John Gardner's The Art of Fiction and Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer. But Mrs Dalloway (Virginia Woolf) was difficult, and this week we've had Italo Calvino's If On a Winter's Night A Traveller. Now I'm reading The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald). I know I should be better read if I'm going to do a literary course but it's hard work. Fiction is for fun, I'm just not that fussy a reader, I'm just finishing the Garth Nix trilogy (again) aimed at kids - Sabriel, Lirael and Abhorsen. And having read all these literary masterpieces, along with Chekhov and Joyce and Kafka, can I say I recommend Sabriel: as good a book as any of them? Great literary fiction it may not be, but an absolute rollercoaster of a book full of dazzling descriptions and characters and a believable world of magic and the land of the dead. Go Mr Nix. Back to Gatsby. Sigh.