"The Little Drummer Girl" is the third book that I've abandoned in my "20 for 20 Reading Challenge" to read twenty books that are more than twenty hours long.

I've really enjoyed the Le Carré books that I've read so far, all of which post-date "The Little Drummer Girl". This book didn't work for me. I listened to the first six and a half hours of the book and found myself increasingly reluctant to return to it, so I've pressed the life's-too-short button and abandoned it,

The book is well written and well-narrated. It has some very powerful scenes in it. The characters are well-drawn and the places are well-described. My problem started with the pace, which is slow and evolved into the characters, none of whom I care about.

After six and a half hours we've finally reached the point where our young British actress has been successfully recruited to work with the Israelis to help them (somehow) take down a Palestinian terrorist cell. I know every detail of the process used to recruit her and it seems to me to be as credible as it is frightening. Reading it was like watching a craftsman build a brick wall with a complex pattern embedded in it or watching a wrangler tame a wild horse. It's fascinating in its own way but you have to care about the craftsman or the horse. I found I didn't care for either.

So I'll never know what Charlie's mission was or whether she succeeded in it or how many people died along the way. I'm OK with that.

I'll be back for other Le Carré books but I'm saying good-bye to this one.

Humour is a hit or miss thing. This one missed for me by a long way.

The first hour is a (long, long, can she STILL be talking about this?) lament about the state of this middle-class white woman's life.

She's 39 (how terrible is that), is married to a man who no longer excites her (or really sees her), has a part-time job that bores her, has young children that she can neither support nor control and has to face the coven of yummy mummies at the school gate who are mean to her. Faced with this deep angst, she responds with snidey wit, ineffective longing and diving into alcohol each evening.

I can see this could be sad in that special-problems-only-middle-class-people-have sort of way but I don't see it as funny.

Maybe what I hear as the not-grown-up-yet, I-was-meant-to-be-special lament of a middle-aged middle-class woman is really a poignant crie de coeur from a desperate woman, fending off existential panic with humour. 

If it is, I don't care.

This is not a woman I want to spend another ten hours listening to.

So, into the Life's Too Short box it goes and I look for another book for the Festus Door.