Random
In Praise of Sorta/Not-Very-Intellectual Fatties
When I was about 5, my mother started reading the first installment in The Boxcar Children to me. She got to the end of chapter one and asked if I wanted her to continue. I could not believe my luck: this story, these characters, lived on in the following chapter. I was accustomed to picture books, wherein the narrative concludes after 15 pages or so. Any big books I may have had were probably anthologies of similar stories, fairy tales or fables or the like. That there were all these bigger longer stories was the most awesome childhood discovery. That The Boxcar Children was a whole series of such books, well, hell’s bells.
This began as a comment to Catherine’s post this morning, but then I felt like I was talking about something kind of different, so I decided to devote a post. Catherine coined the term “intellectual fatties” to describe long, abstruse novels that she gets no joy from reading. Presumably, the longer a difficult book is, the harder it is to get through, which is why she limited the field as to length. This got me to thinking about books that are long, but only regularly difficult. I don’t, to my knowledge, read many very difficult books of any length, so I can’t speak as to that.
The longest books I’ve finished are Moby Dick, War and Peace, A Suitable Boy, Les Miserables, lots of big Dickens. None of these are terribly difficult intellectually, but in all cases the experience was joyous. Longer is not harder to get through, in my experience. It’s actually much easier to read one 1200 page book, intellectually, than to read 4 books of 300 pages. In the latter case, you have to get accustomed to 4 different worlds, 4 different voices, so many more characters. In the first case, you only acclimatize one time, and then you are sailing. And you get to know those characters so much better, and you become fluent in the sound and the rhythms of the prose. After finishing The Pickwick Papers, the first 150 pages of which are dreck, I missed Sam Weller the way I miss good friends in absentia.
Whenever I teach a book to my students, I assign the first 30 or so pages, talk about those, and then assign increasingly larger sections for the duration of the novel. This isn’t just because beginnings are so important; it’s because starting a novel, and learning to navigate its terrain, is the hardest part, and I want to spend a lot of time helping them with that.
While I don’t have any hard numbers to back this up, I’m pretty sure that most of the books I’ve not finished (but have read at least, say, 40 pages of) come in under 200 pages. Don’t know why, really, but perhaps it’s because the investment doesn’t seem worth it, if I’m not pretty immediately delighted by it. Once I get into it, it’ll just be over. That’s no fun.
I prefer television shows to movies for the same reason. If I’ve signed up to immerse myself another person’s vision of things, I don’t want to be hauled ashore after just 2 or 3 hours.
Tags: long books, television
“lots of big Dickens”
Amy, I totally, totally agree. Longer is not harder to get through. Harder to get through is harder to get through. Longer is usually joyous, like you say, if the book is good. After I finished War and Peace, Bleak House, and Brothers Karamazov, I pretty much went into a prolonged depression at the thought of leaving those characters. That’s why I hate it when non-readers use War and Peace as the great example of some dusty book that no one’s actually read. The thing is a page-turner! As is most Dickens. After all, they serialized most of that stuff back in the day, so it had to be riveting.
Of course, there are non-page turners, too, some long, some short. I find some of these to be immensely rewarding, and the others (yes, Gravity’s Rainbow and The Magic Mountain, I’m looking at you) I’ve put down without finishing.
For real though, for me, longer works are difficult for me to get through regardless of difficulty of prose/style/syntax/&c. I think that’s mainly due to time contstraints though. In college, I could tackle longer works like it was my job. I mean, I guess it kind of was, only I was paying to do the work.
But, I can knock out a series of books no problem. I recently went for a nostalgia romp through the Chronicles of Prydain, one of my favorite series as a kid. Overall, it’s probably about 1200-1400 pages. If that was a book, I’d have been daunted. But in chunks of 200-250’ish pages, I knocked it out in just a week and a half or so.
Thinking about how most of those books you use as examples were serialized in their time, how do you think you’d have handled reading them in serial, rather than as a collected whole?
Oh, lord, probably I would have been jumping up and down in restless anticipation. I read really quickly, and if I’m really into a book I can’t stop reading it, even if I have to cancel social plans or roll into work after 2 hrs of sleep. (I was one of those annoying kids that read the whole book as soon as the teacher assigned it.) I hate waiting for the next book in a series to come out. But at least those serials came out weekly-ish back in the day, so it was really more like early tv than novels, I suppose. I guess that wouldn’t have been so bad.
Loved that series! One of my favorites, too.
“lots of big Dickens”
Amy, I totally, totally agree. Longer is not harder to get through. Harder to get through is harder to get through. Longer is usually joyous, like you say, if the book is good. After I finished War and Peace, Bleak House, and Brothers Karamazov, I pretty much went into a prolonged depression at the thought of leaving those characters. That’s why I hate it when non-readers use War and Peace as the great example of some dusty book that no one’s actually read. The thing is a page-turner! As is most Dickens. After all, they serialized most of that stuff back in the day, so it had to be riveting.
Of course, there are non-page turners, too, some long, some short. I find some of these to be immensely rewarding, and the others (yes, Gravity’s Rainbow and The Magic Mountain, I’m looking at you) I’ve put down without finishing.
For real though, for me, longer works are difficult for me to get through regardless of difficulty of prose/style/syntax/&c. I think that’s mainly due to time contstraints though. In college, I could tackle longer works like it was my job. I mean, I guess it kind of was, only I was paying to do the work.
But, I can knock out a series of books no problem. I recently went for a nostalgia romp through the Chronicles of Prydain, one of my favorite series as a kid. Overall, it’s probably about 1200-1400 pages. If that was a book, I’d have been daunted. But in chunks of 200-250’ish pages, I knocked it out in just a week and a half or so.
Thinking about how most of those books you use as examples were serialized in their time, how do you think you’d have handled reading them in serial, rather than as a collected whole?
Oh, lord, probably I would have been jumping up and down in restless anticipation. I read really quickly, and if I’m really into a book I can’t stop reading it, even if I have to cancel social plans or roll into work after 2 hrs of sleep. (I was one of those annoying kids that read the whole book as soon as the teacher assigned it.) I hate waiting for the next book in a series to come out. But at least those serials came out weekly-ish back in the day, so it was really more like early tv than novels, I suppose. I guess that wouldn’t have been so bad.
Loved that series! One of my favorites, too.
Yussssssss!
Guilty. I mean, about the canceling plans to finish books and shit. 8 years ago I called in sick to work to finish that one book that sucks by Dan Brown that I’m too drunk and don’t care enough to remember the title. I don’t know why I did that. That book was such a piece of shit, but I was at a point in my life where it sounded like a good idea to read it, and a good idea to call in to work to finish it. It was a really fucking low point of my life. Don’t judge me, please. Hi.
Guilty. I mean, about the canceling plans to finish books and shit. 8 years ago I called in sick to work to finish that one book that sucks by Dan Brown that I’m too drunk and don’t care enough to remember the title. I don’t know why I did that. That book was such a piece of shit, but I was at a point in my life where it sounded like a good idea to read it, and a good idea to call in to work to finish it. It was a really fucking low point of my life. Don’t judge me, please. Hi.
No thank you.
No thank you.
nice
nice
Intellectual fatties, yes please!
Intellectual fatties, yes please!
Yussssssss!
Guilty. I mean, about the canceling plans to finish books and shit. 8 years ago I called in sick to work to finish that one book that sucks by Dan Brown that I’m too drunk and don’t care enough to remember the title. I don’t know why I did that. That book was such a piece of shit, but I was at a point in my life where it sounded like a good idea to read it, and a good idea to call in to work to finish it. It was a really fucking low point of my life. Don’t judge me, please. Hi.
No thank you.
nice
Intellectual fatties, yes please!