Too Much Information

I am reading Talyn, a book edited by alg, which she gave me when I was last in NY. It's a fantasy (it has maps!), it's intriguing, and the world is nicely built, and so far I am enjoying it. It has, however, been slow going, and finally, yesterday, I realized why: it has a Note on Pronunciation. In the words of Inigo Montoya, Lemme esplain.

I am a whole-word reader, which played hob with my early education: until I stopped trying to decode every word phonetically I read well below grade level (once I stopped I read well above. Go figure). There were all manner of words and names I couldn't pronounce properly because I wasn't sounding them out, but I knew what they meant and I could read them for meaning and fly by, and until I had to read, say, the names of characters from Greek or Norse mythology aloud, it didn't matter. Even today, when I'm reading fantasy or anything else with a vocabulary of exotic names and words (Jeffrey Eugenides Middlesex, for example, which is chock-full of lovely Greek names) I resist the impulse to sound out the names because if I do it once I can't stop, and it slows my reading. And my problem with Talyn is not that it is full of words like "taak" and "Injtaak" and "Kroviidas", because when I'm reading I'd just fly by with my own field pronunciation, as it were. My problem is with the Note on Pronunciation at the beginning, which I made the mistake of reading before I started the book. Because now, whenever I see the word "taak" (which is a component of many larger words) I remember that it's pronounced "TAY-ak," and with a compound word I have to remember that on doubled consonents the consonants are "bounced"--that is, hit once, then again more lightly ("haddar" is pronounced HA-duh-DAY-ar). So every time I encounter a non-standard word I have to stop and figure out how to pronounce it, and I'm back in third grade reading far more slowly than I'd like to.

I also note that "more information on the language, costuming, and customs of the world of Korre can be found" at the author's website. I know some people live and die for this stuff; my own personal feeling is that whatever amounts of world-building I do, I only want a small percentage to show up on the page, enough to create a world without slowing things down. And that's what happened with me: I got slowed down by information I, as a reader, didn't need.