THEN WE CAME TO THE END

Most of us followed them out soon after, and, in the end, last call was announced. The lights came up, the jukebox went quiet. We could hear the clink of glasses and the exhausted silence of waitstaff as they began to clean up, wiping down the shiny surfaces,placing the padded barstools on top of the bar. Their work would soon be done, they could see something waiting for them at home - a bed, a meal, a lover. But we didn't want the night to end. We kept hanging on, waiting for them to send over the big guy who'd force us out with a final command. And we would leave, eventually. Out to the parking lot, a few parting words. "Sure was good to see you again," we'd say. And with that, we'd get in our cars and open the windows and drive off, tapping the horn a final time. But for the moment, it was nice just to sit there together. We were the only two left. Just the two of us, you and me.

And that, is the final paragraph of this book by Joshua Ferris. And it is a book I ended up liking very much, if only by chance.

Books are a funny thing. While we all tend to have favoured genres and styles of writing, our ability to digest and appreciate a book also depends on our mood. Well, okay, that's very much the case for me anyway.

I tend to have periods of tremendous reading activity, followed by a period during which my eyes race over the rows and rows of words without absorbing anything. And then, before I know it, I'll be back in a reading frenzy again.

I also split my books into three categories of reading speed - fast, normal and slow.

Some books are meant to be raced through. Dan Browns, Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Trilogy, John Grishams and fluffy stuff like Sophie Kinsellas, Harry Potters and Mike Gayles, for instance, I devour rather rapidly.

I also tend to go through Douglas Couplands, John Irvings, Neil Gaimans and my favourite genre - memoirs of screwed-up people - rather quickly.

Haruki Murakami, Banana Yoshimoto Ryu Murakami, and many of the Japanese writers, I usually go at a normal pace - no fuss but also no forcing myself to slow down.

Books I remember slowing down for - Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World and Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods.

It's all fairly typical because reading speed is also dictated by the pace of the writing and how fast the plot moves. But sometimes, there are books that I instinctively want to read fast but deliberately slow down for, and I'm all the better for it. Then We Came to the End is one of them.

When I first picked it up, I raced through it. Because in my head, it was lumped in the same category as Microserfs and JPod (Douglas Coupland), Slab Rat (Ted Heller) and other cubicle farm type novels that tend to be snappy and fast to read.

And I really hated it.

It was one of those books I was hesitant to pay 30+ bucks for so I read maybe a quarter of it in Borders? Subsequently I read the rest of it, less the last 50 or so pages, in the library. So you can say fatigue intervened and prevented me from finishing it and billing it as a hopelessly irritating piece of work. (Couldn't borrow it cos I forgot my library card that day.)

Recently, I borrowed it from the restless one. I started from the beginning because I could no longer find where I stopped - it was that long ago. This time, I was in the right frame of mind for it and I went through it less like a bullet train. And the book is really good.

I guess I've ranted this far just to say there's a time, place and pace for every book and these are all highly subjective.

I'm just glad I was tired that day in the library.

The narrative is a collective "we". At some point, you'll start to wonder, who's this nameless "we" that keeps talking about everyone else? And it's you and I, and it's true that it is you and I.

I'm not sure if other people relate to the book and I don't know if it's easier for me to because I'm in PR - not quite advertising but close enough to recognise agency dynamics and the art of bullshitting. But honestly, it's not really about advertising. It's about work and the bullshit that goes on at work and the little things we do to keep ourselves sane or insane. It's about the herd mentality and the individuals and the "we" and "you" and "I".

Such a summary hardly does it justice. Seriously, you just have to read it.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way...

The opening of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, also quoted in Then We Came to the End.