Time passes

I think I liked Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life better the first time I read it - I occasionally find myself defending him to others, and I do think it's a little unfair that he is so widely loathed when it is possible that we should consider his archness in the light of a failing he cannot help rather than an affectation for which he should be despised (he seems to serve as arch-nemesis for several writers I know)! It is an insubstantial work, in any case, but I have found in it a good epigraph for TTWC (alongside this one perhaps!):

Whatever the merits of Proust's work, even a fervent admirer would be hard pressed to deny one of its awkward features: length. As Proust's brother, Robert, put it, "The sad thing is that people have to be very ill or have broken a leg in order to have the opportunity to read In Search of Lost Time."

Slow books

From T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), p. 599:

The length of his novels has probably done Richardson's reputation even more harm than his moralizing. It has kept Clarissa from being read. Or it has caused it to be read in a version which curtails those minutiae which, Richardson rightly pointed out, are the strength of his method. Or it has caused readers to sample Pamela and reject Richardson on the basis of that book. . . . If one likes to read, there is no necessary assumption that the sooner one gets through reading a book the better. In spite of Poe, it is our opinion that neither poetry nor prose need aim exclusively at sharp, simple effects--length itself, if the details are not dull and are so organized as to support each other, may contribute to an effect unified in complexity and gaining cumulative impact. Whether Richardson succeeds in making his details interesting and in unifying them, each reader must decide. Tennyson, speaking of Clarissa, told FitzGerald that he loved 'those large, still, Books'. It does not seem to us that 'still' is quite the right adjective, since almost every episode in Clarissa is written with considerable intensity. 'Slow' might be more accurate. Clarissa is long not because, like War and Peace, it is rich and varied in incident and character, but because, like The Remembrance of Things Past, it wrings the utmost possible out of the incidents and characters it has.

Jet lag/speed read

Alas, I experienced an intense bout of wakefulness after those optimistic last posts - still at the computer rather than winding down, it's 1:30am here and I was really hoping to run in the morning before 9:30am departure for sightseeing. Probably that is not realistic....

But I saw a funny link I had to share....

Brendan Byrne at Rhizome on speed-reading caught my attention anyway - and then I came upon this paragraph:

"If only I'd known about RSVP while in college, I may have actually gotten through all 1,000 pages of Tom Jones," writes Jim Pagels in Slate. The initial impulse to question Pagels' purity of spirit should be quashed. No one can read Tom Jones the way Fielding's initial audience did in 1749 (unless someone were to construct an immersive VR world, complete with memory wipes, to enable full reading-experience). And, indeed, the first page or so of Tom Jones goes down easily enough on Spreeder, if only because it is primarily table-setting. Stick the first couple of paragraphs of The Manifesto of the Communist Party in there, and you'll get the gist, but you begin to see the delicate impact of the loss of subvocalization. The twin delicious names "Metternich and Guizot" cannot be chewed over, nor can the inadvisable nostalgia associated with the phrase "French Radicals and German police-spies" be indulged in, even briefly.

Obviously I had to click through that link - Jim Pagels was my Columbia student, that may well have been my Tom Jones assignment! Here is the underlying link.

I think I am not in agreement with the Byrne commentary - I have never endeavored for speed reading, but I can't remember not knowing how to read and I have always been able to read at a not preternaturally but certainly implausibly fast rate. I can only think of a few times when I actually had to pause after and digest - I remember a spell of daily reading in the Rare Books and Manuscripts room at the British Library when I would request the maximum number of books (fifteen, maybe, or was it only twelve?) per day and basically just go through them all (many were shorter eighteenth-century things like Jethro Tull's The New Horse-Houghing Husbandry, more pamphlet than book) so that I could get my full total of new ones the next day.

It's not quite skimming, it's definitely speed-reading in some sense, and assuming I'm not trying to read something densely philosophical, I can probably under real pressure get through about 2000 pages in 8 hours and have decent recall (this works best when you are reading purposefully, i.e. for research for a book or because you need to write a report on a dossier or similar - for real serious reading i.e. of narrative history or non-theoretical scholarship, 100pp/hr is more realistic, or perhaps more comfortable is the better way of putting it). That particular library session was almost the only time I remember when I didn't read a novel on public transportation on the way home - I was clearly still letting it sink in and sort itself out. It was an interesting feeling but doing it too often would probably take years off your life!

I read Bleak House as a teenager in not much more than one sitting, maybe eight or ten hours, and I reread War and Peace a few summers ago also just over a couple of days, in three or four longish sessions - an average crime novel c. 75K will probably take me less than two hours to read, and I do like really long novels that will give me better value for money! This is a gift, especially for work purposes, but it is also a curse in terms of the gaping maw always needing to have more things fed into it (I had a shock of recognition when I saw this scene at the end of Fargo - it is a little frightening, but I have never seen a better depiction of my relationship with books!).

One of the things I write about in the style book is the impact of duration on the experience of reading - I think War and Peace at 10 hours is a quite different animal than War and Peace at 50 hours....

Tomes

It is a hazard of working on eighteenth-century literature: these are in fact only six books, not nineteen, and in an ideal world I would reread them all over the next couple of days while finishing working on a talk I'm giving on Thursday!  (And where is my 'real' edition of Locke's Essay?  One of these days I am actually going to have to clean up my office in Philosophy Hall....)

End-of-week update

These Seven Sicknesses, a.k.a. the Sophocles marathon at the Flea, was highly worthwhile: the treatment of the Oedipus plays seems a bit unstable on the farce-tragedy axis (and I thought the actor playing Oedipus was perhaps the weakest in the show, or at any rate his performance was too campy to be at all moving), but the middle segment of Philoctetes-Ajax is excellent (the Ajax staging is just superb, particularly the handling of the sheep scene) and the concluding pair of Electra-Antigone works very well also.

I finished reading A Dance with Dragons and all I can say is that I really do not see that George R. R. Martin will be able to wrap up the rest of the story in only one more volume, however long!  He is temperamentally averse to leaving anything out, and it leads to some frustrating choices in volumes four and five; my heart sank when I realized that the last volume was literally going to go back to the temporal starting point of the previous one and cover exactly the same time period, not to show a markedly divergent view but just to fill out some things that didn't fit in.  You then see a character you care about, who grew and changed over the previous installment, back in his pre-change version, and for no good reason; this strikes me as a fundamental breach of the compact with the reader, just as I dislike the playing-fast-and-loose-with-alternate-timestream thing that a certain television series I love has been indulging in: the sense of reality you have in television drama is thin enough that you cannot afford to erode it too far by, say, bringing back to life a character you have killed off in the alternate timestream by letting the space-time continuum shift and reconfigure everything. . . .

(You can get the first four installments of George R. R. Martin in a box or a bundle, but really what I recommend instead is Wolf Hall on the one end or Garth Nix's brilliant Abhorsen trilogy on the other.)

The due date is rapidly approaching for my ratings on second-round reading for the New York Public Library Young Lions Prize, so I won't be writing much here about what I'm reading over next few weeks (confidentiality!), and I'm also teaching Clarissa again this semester, which eats up quite a bit of reading time.  However there is always room for a little light reading round the edges...

Miscellaneous links:

Neil Gaiman on growing up reading C. S. Lewis, Tolkien and Chesterton.

And I'm giving a talk today at 4pm at the CUNY Graduate Center; I am just hoping it will stop raining to the extent that people will actually be willing to leave their dwellings and venture out into the world to come to it!

Light reading on the road

The Kindle is a godsend for travel; I cannot imagine what peculiar, unsatisfactory and yet physically backbreaking a selection I would otherwise have been lugging around during the past week and a half. I read a few books that were truly exceptional; I had a frantic downloading session the night before I left, when it suddenly occurred to me that ten days requires a pretty large number of words if I didn't want to have to fall back on hotel pickings, so I had a lot of good stuff to choose from.

The two really spectacular books were Teju Cole's Open City, which I loved so much that I really must write a separate post about it; and Neal Stephenson's Anathem, which I also just loved. I bought a copy of that in hardcover some time after its initial release - an ill-timed purchase, given that the paperback was about to come out, and that it is really too physically cumbersome a book to want to read in the heavier format. Also the opening 15% or so (I am a Kindle reader, the percentages are unavoidable!) is pretty awfully static; it's not unreadable, but it is the sort of thing that a less well-known writer would almost certainly have been made to cut, and I feel sure that there would have been some way to plunge much more quickly into the 'real' action of the book. But truly it is a wonderful novel; I even ended up talking about it in class yesterday (we were reading Diderot's Jacques the Fatalist and I was pondering questions about the relationship between dialogue in fiction and the philosophical dialogue - is the coincidence of the name just that, i.e. fundamentally a bit misleading, or do the two genres have something more seriously intimate to do with each other?).

I actually had some very good other books too, only they are slightly diminished by the dauntingly awesome nature of these two. I loved Lauren Beukes's books Zoo City (GENIUS! especially the pastiche material, and its witty and depressing reimagining of Pullman's daemons) and Moxyland. Deborah Harkness's A Discovery of Witches is the perfect light reading; among other things, it is so very refreshing to read a book with a female scholarly protagonist who so completely and utterly rings true to my own experience of the scholarly life. Taylor Stevens' The Informationist is also fantastically perfect reading material - how can this woman just have burst out of nowhere? Really I feel she must have been writing thrillers already under another name, this one is so very perfectly crafted and so very much to my taste; but whatever the deal, it has my strongest recommendation, I found it just fantastically gripping.

Other miscellaneous novels, good in their way but not as well suited to my reading preferences: Jennifer Crusie, Faking It; Ekaterina Sedia, The House of Discarded Dreams (I think well of Sedia's books, but they are not exactly what I like - I'm not truly a Jonathan Carroll fan either, though I have read most of his books and enjoyed a few of them very much indeed - I did really enjoy what she does here with the horseshoe crabs); Robin Hobb, Dragon Keeper (led astray in this case by my panicky search for long books), Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants (this one made me think strongly of my grandmother, who would have loved it).

Hmmm - I had better get a move on with my real day, only inertia has overcome me!

Caviar, champagne, beards

Miscellaneous light reading: N. K. Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (loved it and have downloaded the next installment), Gail Godwin's Unfinished Desires, a recommendation from Jo Walton (it did indeed make me want to read more novels about nuns), Liza Marklund's Studio Sex (the 'twist' involved in the journal entries is perhaps a bit too obvious from the start, but nonetheless very much the kind of book I like).

Also, the first two books in Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time sequence. These are so much beloved by a couple of my blogging friends (Levi Stahl, Ed Park) that I resolved to give 'em a chance (I have always meant to read them since I first heard about them in Anthony Burgess's 99 Novels - by the way, a previously unknown [and on the whole undistinguished] work of AB's has been unearthed - but never quite took to them when I tried); the University of Chicago Press has released the whole sequence in electronic editions, and the first installment is currently available for free.

I dislike many things about the voice and the milieu, but I realized as I reviewed my year in reading that some of my best experiences in reading this year involved immersive long novels of a sort that do not grow on trees (Dorothy Dunnett, War and Peace), and that Powell's would be worth a pop. I do not find it intellectually and stylistically engaging in the way of Proust, and it also seems to me much less interesting than Henry James in terms of these questions about what one understands at the time versus later on, but there's definitely something addictive: I've downloaded the next four onto the Kindle and certainly plan to read the rest of the sequence in coming weeks.

Something about the style definitely continues to irk me: I marked passages as I read that seemed to me both remarkable and annoying. Here's a good example from the first installment:

On the whole it could not be said that one felt better for Uncle Giles's visit. He brought with him some fleeting suggestion, always welcome at school, of an outside world; though against this had to be weighed the disturbing impact of home-life in school surroundings: even home-life in its diminished and undomestic embodiment represented by my uncle. He was a relation: a being who had in him perhaps some of the same essence that went towards forming oneself as a separate entity. Would one's adult days be spent in worrying about the Trust? What was he going to do at Reading? Did he manage to have quite a lot of fun, or did he live in perpetual hell? These were things to be considered. Some apology for his sudden appearance seemed owed to Stringham: after that, I might try to do some work to be dealt with over the weekend.

I suppose part of the slight embarrassment of reading a passage like this is that the naive narrator is never really fully cast off - the novel's ongoing playfulness about youthful versus slightly older misapprehensions makes the reader (a reader like me?) uncomfortable. The work I am most reminded of, though superficially nothing like it, is Pope's Essay on Man, a poem I particularly dislike because of the trouble it takes to develop an elaborate and fluent idiom that seems to me overequipped given the relative banality and commonplace nature of the thoughts therein expressed!

These passages from the second installment will give a clearer sense of the quality I'm both struck and troubled by:

I must have been about twenty-one or twenty-two at the time, and held then many rather wild ideas on the subject of women: conceptions largely the result of having read a good deal without simultaneous opportunity to modify by personal experience the recorded judgment of others upon that matter: estimates often excellent in their conclusions if correctly interpreted, though requiring practical knowledge to be appreciated at their full value.

In business, at least in a small way, he had begun to 'make a bit' on his own, and there seemed no reason to disbelieve his account of himself as looked upon in his firm as a promising young man. In fact, it appeared that Peter, so far from becoming the outcast from society prophesied by our housemaster, Le Bas, now showed every sign of being about to prove himself a notable success in life: an outcome that seemed to demand another of those revisions of opinion, made every day more necessary, in relation to such an enormous amount of material, accepted as incontrovertible at an earlier period of practical experience.

All the same, although still far from appreciating many of the finer points of Mrs. Andriadis's party--for there were, of course, finer points to be appreciated in retrospect--and, on the whole, no less ignorant of what the elements there present had consisted, I was at the same time more than half aware that such latitudes are entered by a door through which there is, in a sense, no return. The lack of ceremony that had attended our arrival, and the fact of being so much in the dark as to the terms upon which the party was being given, had been both, in themselves, a trifle embarrassing; but, looking back on the occasion, armed with later knowledge of individual affiliations among the guests, there is no reason to suppose that mere awareness of everyone's identity would have been calculated to promote any greater feeling of ease: if anything, rather the reverse. The impact of entertainments given by people like Mrs. Andriadis, as I learnt in due course, depends upon rapidly-changing personal relationships; so that to be apprised suddenly of the almost infinite complication of such associations--if any such omniscience could, by some magical means, have been imparted--without being oneself, even at a distance, at all involved, might have been a positive handicap, perhaps a humiliating one, to enjoyment.

The periphrasis is so noncommittal, ultimately! But there are some good moments, and I am slightly tempted to adopt the artist Barnby's excuse as a catchphrase: "The dust must have confused my powers of differentiation. . . ."

Wednesday miscellany

The second paragraph of this piece was so extraordinarily vicious that I read to the end with a kind of enthralled fascination! I have no reason to disagree with its verdict, and I too am rendered extraordinarily irritable by slack writing, but it has also always seemed to me that it is bad for the soul to write a review of this ilk very often...

At Tor.com, Fabio Fernandes on translating A Clockwork Orange into Brazilian Portuguese.

A countdown of the hundred best fantasy and science-fiction novels?

The syllabus for Matthew Kirschenbaum's graduate seminar on simulations.

Last but not least: Charlie Williams prefers typecasting to podcasting.

This week's mostly all about catching up on miscellaneous medical appointments (nothing major), rehearsing for Tino's Guggenheim piece and trying to sort out a good exercise routine - not doing so well on the last front, but it is a work in progress. The other major activity is a massive reading binge - at the humane society charity shop in Cayman, one of the volumes I picked up was Dorothy Dunnett's Niccolo Rising. I liked Dunnett's mystery novels very much when I was a teenager, but her historical ones never held much appeal for me, despite my dear friend E.B.T.'s enthusiastic advocacy of them during our grad school years. But long is good when it comes to charity-shop light reading, and though I wouldn't say it's my perfect light reading (also it suffers from the unfortunate juxtaposition with Hilary Mantel's really brilliant Wolf Hall!), I certainly enjoyed the first installment enough to go and check out volumes two through seven from the Barnard Library yesterday.

(Where, by the way, I ran into a colleague of mine who is also doing Tino's piece - and as we discussed it, the young lady behind the library checkout counter exclaimed, "Are you doing Tino's piece? So am I!" It is a cast of thousands!)

There is something truly lovely and addictive about reading through a huge series in a relatively small amount of time. I read Lian Hearn's trilogy like that; Susan Howatch is perhaps my most recent long immersive series-reading experience, at least the one that comes most strongly to mind; but I was reminded as I plucked Dunnetts from the shelf of how I held out for a long time against the Aubrey-Maturin novels and then read the first one and basically couldn't really do anything else until I had read all of them - every day I went to Cross-Campus Library at Yale and checked out another armful or four or five of them and took them home and read them all, four or five days later I was done and wished I had eked them out for longer, but it was well worth it!

(On which note, I will conclude by adding that Vikram Seth is writing a sequel to A Suitable Boy, another long book I read in fits of transport...)