Black Lamb, Gray Falcon by Rebecca West has been on my current reading list for a while now. It's not going away any time soon either, because at 1100 pages it's a serious reading commitment.

It's not that I don't want to finish it--it's reasonably absorbing. And it's helped me understand, in sort of a patchwork way, the history of Yugoslavia, at least through the 1930s.

But I am getting to the point where other books are starting to look awfully good. I felt better, though, when I stumbled across this bit of a review of BLGF on Amazon:

...The prose was exemplary, however, the length was daunting - it took one busy executive six months to finish the book, while another executive finished it in two months, as he was able to read it during staff meetings.

Those meetings must be real barn-burners. "What? Of course I'm listening! ...Oh, this? A paperweight."