I've been making up my reading list for this year, and so far it’s another eclectic mix. Of course it isn’t set in blood-new stuff that sounds interesting comes out all the time, and I must be flexible. This year I want to reread more books than I did last year, things I haven’t read in several years, like Cold Mountain and Childhood’s End. Patrick Rothfuss’s sequel to The Name of the Wind comes out in April, and I must leave room for that.
After reading Stephen King’s The Dark Tower and Peter Matthiessen’s brilliant ShadowCountry back to back, I decided I needed something light. (after Shadow Country, something by Brian Moore or Cormac McCarthy would qualify). So I’m reading Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch.
Pratchett is light, and frequently hilarious, but he’s never frivolous; behind the funny exterior, he has a lot to say about power, and the uses and misuses thereof, corruption, and the daily struggle to just keep one’s feet in an uncertain world. When I read his books I keep a pencil handy to mark these little insights; I think he’s as profound as Swift. Why he never quite gets his due critically is beyond me. (Well, actually it’s not. He writes fantasy, doesn’t he? Thus his work is nothing but light escapism. Lord, I hate snobbery.)
Next, I will probably FINALLY get to Dan Simmons’s Rise of Endymion, which, like Night Watch, has been sitting on my shelf for some time. Simmons is another seriously underrated writer. This man wants readers to think. And his erudition floors me.
Since the Simmons I have is an omnibus of Endymion and Rise of Endymion, that will take me through most of February. I think Cold Mountain will be next; it seems more like winter read than something for sunny weather. I haven’t read this since it was new, so I’m looking forward to it.
Then what? Actually, I don’t know. Perhaps something new will appear, maybe in the book club circular, that I simply must read. I owe great thanks to the science fiction book club, which is where I discovered Simmons, Pratchett, Naomi Novik and Patrick Rothfuss.
So, I see that my ‘list’ takes me through February at the furthest. Perhaps that’s as it should be-this isn’t a list for class, after all. Perhaps after that I won’t even worry about it; I’ll just prowl around and see what looks good to me, or if my mother recommends something. Right now she's prodding me to read The Divine Comedy. I promised her I'll think about it.
I used to be a fast reader. I don’t know what my word-per-minute speed was, but I could zip through an eight-hundred page novel or biography in two afternoons (sometimes a day). Long books assigned in class held no terror for me. For twenty years I’ve kept a log of books, acquired in one column, read in the other. Every year I rejoiced as the ‘read’ column got longer and longer.
Then four years ago, I began having trouble seeing words on the page. They looked lumpy, as if somebody had smeared them with mashed potatoes. This, of course, sent me to the optometrist. During the exam she discovered what she called the worst cataracts she’d ever seen in anyone under sixty (I was, and still am, CONSIDERABLY under sixty).
Then two surgeries, two weeks apart. Lots of drops. My vision cleared up, although I now needed reading glasses (I never got used to bifocals). Ten days after the second surgery, the retina in my right eye tore. I had the surgery to fix that less than a day after I noticed the tear. This meant two weeks off of work, doing nothing. This was not a vacation; nothing means nothing. No chores, no exercise. Long periods each day lying on your side. Even more drops, and almost no reading.
When the eye recovered, I discovered that my reading speed had dropped. Strangely, I didn’t really mind. I don’t know if it was a shift in my attitude, or maybe the things I was reading, but I began to enjoy reading more slowly.
Perhaps it was my (now expired) youth, but now I think I was in too much of a hurry. Now I no longer regret my lost speed. If you read more slowly, you begin to sink into the book’s mood.
The book that did this for me was Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast. It’s a good length, about four-hundred pages in the edition I have. Lots of plot, lots of intrigue. But for many, many pages, nothing happens. The point of the book becomes the slow, almost smothering sense of decay in Gormenghast Castle and the lives of the characters. It’s not pleasant, but it’s seductive; it pulls you right in, so when it’s time to eat or do laundry, you close the book-and feel almost like you’ve just woken from a deep sleep.
I’d read books with great atmosphere before, but I had never experienced this. It happened again with Lawrence Durrell’s Justine. Again, not a lot of action. Most of what happens is internal. But you just plunge your head into Alexandria of the 1920's-and drink deep.
Now I’m almost through with The Dark Tower VII. It’s going to take me about twelve days. A few years ago, I would have read it in about two or three, depending on other commitments. It’s strange; some part of me doesn’t want to finish it. Not because I know this won’t have a happy ending (if it does, it better be hard-earned). It’s because I’ll miss the mood, the texture of the thing, that almost-physical sense of falling into another world.
Perhaps you should try this some time. Pick up a book and don’t even think about how quickly you can finish it. Treat it like a lover; go slow and savor your time together. You may end up reading fewer books, but the rewards will be richer.
