 In Defense of the DoorstopbyNicki LeoneTen years ago a group of friends and I decided to start an investment club even though (or perhaps because) none of us knew the first thing about the stock market. Our first rule was that we wouldn’t buy any stock that cost more than twenty dollars a share. “I think,” a young but wise investment broker we consulted gently responded, “it is better to own a little bit of a very good stock, than a lot of a mediocre one.” In other words it’s about merit, not about price. The young man’s advice echoed in my mind last week as I was reading “Size Matters,” the column by friend and fellow contributor Lauren Baratz-Logsted on the very large books she has loved. . . . as time treads on, as one moves through middle age and Kipling’s unforgiving minute becomes more literal truth than literary metaphor, choices concerning how to spend the remainder of one’s reading life become critical. Reading a big book is such an investment. A commitment. A sacrifice. The mind says, “Yes, if I take on this thousand-page behemoth I may feel a sense of perverse accomplishment, but is it really worth it? I could read three other books in the same period! Like my colleague, I adore very large books. But I admit that I whimpered a bit at the thought that it is better to read three short books than one long one. It was an automatic reflex of distress, if only because Lauren and I are of an age—and yet I do not feel the way she does at all. Although like her I recognize Kipling’s “unforgiving minute,” and although I have known for quite awhile now that I will not live forever, that I am fast approaching that point in my life where the years before me are fewer than the years behind me, this sense of impending mortality has not impacted my reading life. I still seem to think that I have all the time in the world to read. I still read like a teenager lives—as though the future is wide open and endless. So, setting aside the fact that I am in complete and stubborn denial about how much time is left of my reading life, I did find myself wondering what, exactly, I objected to in the notion that it is better to read three short books instead of one long one. Part of my attraction to very long books is pure materialism. I’m acquisitive and greedy about books by nature, so naturally I like big books because there is more in them. For this reason I find encyclopedias, dictionaries, reference books and “complete collections” of authors’ works to be almost irresistible. Also, I have a competitive streak in my approach to reading that sees every unread book as unconquered territory. This is why I rarely abandon a book unfinished, even if I don’t like it. I’m like a Napoleon of literature, the longer the book, the greater the challenge. I just refuse to let any book get the best of me. But ultimately my fondness for the big and lengthy (books! I’m talking about books here, people!) comes back to what my friend the investment broker said—it’s about quality, not quantity. The quality, that is, of the reading experience. Because, naturally, if I was talking number of words or number of pages, then the greatest writers in the world are the people who put together this year’s congressional budget (3,985 pages). On the other hand, if it really were better to read lots of short books instead of fewer long ones, then we’d all only read short stories. Or poems. Or people’s twitterings . . . which I realize is awfully close to an accurate assessment of some folks’ reading lives. But most of us read for story. We like to get lost in a book. And this, I think, is what made me whimper a bit when my friend wrote that she preferred to read three good short books to one good long one. I really like to get lost in a book. Really lost. Not a “Calgon, take me away” hour-long bubble bath lost. Not a lazy afternoon on the beach with a book and a cooler of beer lost. No, I prefer to be David Livingstone somewhere in Africa lost. Lost with no hope of return, and does somebody need to send out a rescue party? Which explains how differently Lauren Baratz-Logsted and I read Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke—the last “doorstop” on her list of big books. Lauren rationed it: “I was over forty years old, life was getting shorter by the minute, and if I forsook other reading to engage with the book straight through, as enjoyable as the book was on many levels, I would resent the hell out of it on behalf of all I was giving up. So I put myself on a 100-page-a-day ration and there I happily remained.” I, on the other hand, (and also over forty) opened the book, fell right in, and barely came up for air until it was over. I’m on record as saying that Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is “the only eight-hundred-page doorstop I’ve ever been tempted to read more than three times.” If I resented anything, it was the periods I had to put the thing down to eat, or sleep. I loved the extravagant intricacy of the story, the gorgeous excess of its imagined world. And I find that I am drawn to books that revel in that kind of literary, imaginative excess. It’s a kind of can’t-be-contained enthusiasm that forever reaches outward, further and further into its own creation, like a Mandelbrot pattern or one of those Dr. Seuss stories where the animals in the zoo just get weirder and weirder. It’s why I remain affectionately tolerant of every Harry Potter novel, despite the many flaws in their narrative structure. Why I am admiring and fond of The Mists of Avalon even though the book is riddled with historical inaccuracies. Why I still count Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon the apex of my reading experience, and why at this point I’ve re-read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell not just three times, but something like six. I’m always wanting to go back into such books just to look around, to see what else is in there, what I might have missed. Because I always miss something, the first—or third—time around. Usually this level of lost requires a dedicated series of books—Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles, for example, Paul Scott’s Jewel in the Crown series, The Lord of the Rings—but it can happen in a book as short as six hundred pages. Oh, I like and greatly admire many, many books that are much shorter. But I seem to hit my “Dr. Livingstone” moment with books somewhere around the six hundred page mark. By then, I probably haven’t been heard from for weeks. I am so drawn to large, complex and ornate stories that I have a positively Pavlovian response to fat books: I very nearly salivate. Ooooh, I think. What’s in that? A casual perusal of my bookshelves, (and ignoring the nonfiction altogether because that would just be cheating), reveals about twenty-five different books that are over six hundred pages long. I’ve read about half of them more than once, about a third, more than twice. And without an ounce of regret for the many other books I could have been reading instead. So yes, Lauren, my dear colleague and friend, size does matter. In my reading life, bigger is so very often better. Books mentioned in this column:
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