Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

For a panel at the Farthing Party this weekend, papersky asked me to read the piece of ianmcdonald's Desolation Road that I read at her and rysmiel's wedding. I couldn't find my copy of the book, but I have Papersky's emails to me about wedding plans, which included the piece I'm reading. I also read some of the emails she'd send me before and after that, including cheerful discussions of what to wear ("anything you like"), the non-necessity of gifts (in which I got silly and talked about the possibility that she already had five platypus warmers or that rysmiel disliked monotremes), and similar things (along with practicalities about airports, rides to Hay, and such). That was fun, in a quiet, reminiscent way.

I pasted the reading into Word, fixed a couple of small transcription errors ("sand" for "sang" and an extra vowel dropped into one of the run-together words that it's full of), and printed it out in 14-point type, so I can practice. (rysmiel is going to bring a copy of the book to the hotel tomorrow, but I didn't feel like waiting.)

First, I read it through taking the advice Papersky gave me five years ago, to read the run-together words a bit faster than normal. Then I had an idea: deliberately read the rest of the text more slowly than my normal conversational speed, which is a good idea when I'm reading aloud, and do the runtogetherphrases in my fast New York way. I think it works, and that thinking of the other parts as "slow down here" rather than those as "speed up now" will probably improve intelligibility, by giving me the contrast without taking me faster than I'm comfortable.

cattitude read me T. H. White's The Sword in the Stone, at a chapter or part-chapter at a time, before bed. We finished last night (the very last chapter is short, so he folded it in with the penultimate).

( spoiler warning? )

Now we need to select a next reading-aloud book: even if we had it, Cattitude informs me that The Once and Future King isn't nearly as good.

(I'd thought of going back and editing my previous post, but disabling comments means I can't get to the "edit post" page.)

Edited to add: Thanks for all the suggestions; a necessary qualification is "something Cattitude has already read", so we're probably better off with old favorites than with anything new or obscure.