On Big Books

 Did you know, I’m into books? I like them a lot. I like collecting them, I like organising them, I like reading them, I like thinking about them after I’ve read them - I write about them, sometimes I even write them. This often leads to the assumption that I find the bigger a book is, the better. This is not necessarily true.

I have read big books and there are definitely larger books I’ve enjoyed, The Essays of Michel de Montaigne is a reading experience I found difficult but also very rewarding which grows the more I think about it and leads me to want to read it again. The same is true of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. My favourite novel, Tom Jones is rather long, but it never feels it. At least, not till Tom gets to London. 

Often I’ve found big books do not always have the full bang for their buck. I’m glad I read all of Clarissa and I can now appreciate the positive impact it had on literature and the interesting realistic and psychological things it attempted but I shall probably never return to it.

Nor do I expect to return to Ducks Newburyport, despite how fascinating it was to try and tease out an organisational and thematic principle. Les Miserables was a book that seems to be diminished by its size, the sheer onslaught of everything leading to no set-piece or character standing out. I know others would disagree, citing the chase in the sewers or the manning of the barricade, but imagine a smaller book where one of those big moments was the central moment and I think it would be a stronger book.

That’s not to say all big books are bad. Dickens is at his best when he has the space to stretch out and be truly Dickens, Hard Times being easily the weakest of his works I’ve read. Anna Karenina also has this wonderful quality of exactly as long as it needs to be, I wonder if War and Peace feels the same. Ulysses is reportedly a book that improves on reread and, having enjoyed it the first time, I can see how having a clearer expectation of the journey ahead, it would be more enjoyable. I’ve certainly found that every time I’ve reread the equally idiosyncratic Tristram Shandy. I’d like to read Middlemarch again, I wonder if I’d find it as alienating as I did the first time.

One book I can’t ever imagine reading again is Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. While there were certainly moments and characters I enjoyed, and the peculiarly meditative style had a way of separating Proust time from normal time, I did find it something of a wet fart. Maybe it was the translation. I couldn’t read Don Quixote till I found a translation that slipped down easily enough. 

I tend to tackle two big beasts a year, one in the summer and one near Christmas. This summer’s book is The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu. While there are books I’ve split up over a year (Pamela, Montaigne and Lost Time) I tend to tackle the big book in the August holiday. This holiday I was finishing the settlement of my new house and learning/rehearsing the main part in a play and I simply didn’t get much of anything read. This means that after two months, I am yet to break halfway through Genji.

It’s one of those books which make it hard to carry around everywhere and pull out whenever. The book itself is physically large, fat and floppy, heavy if propped up on a chest or belly. It’s simply too cumbersome to sit in the park with and to throw it in a bag to grab at moments at school would be to leave no room for my raincoat or lunch. What’s more, the long chapters, detailed intricacies of courtly life and multiple characters (all without names) mean that it can’t be understood in small chunks either. Yet neither can it be read in big chunks, as too much Genji is a cosh and you find yourself asleep and dribbling before you know it. 

This is not to say Genji is unenjoyable, and it’s not boring, but it has a dreamy meditative quality, not unlike Proust, that means it’s simply not a book to be gobbled in large chunks. It’s one of those occasions where there is no solution but patience, read thirty or forty pages and night and watch it slowly be nibbled away. Now the play is over, the house settled and a nice routine has been established I am enjoying my time with Genji, entering this expansive world and life so different to mine and watch the scroll of his life gently unwind. I am looking forward to necking a few short, intense novels when I get done though.