Books you want to read, but don't feel ready for yet.

[FranzS]

There is an interesting point here, that probably deserves its own thread. "At what point is reading a book about the destination rather than the journey." It is so easy to get caught up in "I have to read this classic, than this one, and my friends are talking about this book so I have to read it, and then this one." that it becomes more about having read a book than reading a book.

Do you read "War and Peace" to have had the experience of reading War and Peace? Or do you read it to.....read it? We are living in a world where everything is instantly delivered to us - except books. Books still take the time (and subsequent energy) to consume.

And while I think we can say that we all love reading here, do we get caught up in the idea of the destination we forget about the journey?

I think we would all love to say "well of course I read books for the journey, because that's what reading is," but have you ever had the experience where your "to read" list grows so fast that you feel like you have to keep up?

I don't worry about this. The reason I've read classics is that I assumed they must be worth reading. Where I've started a classic and found myself still not enjoying it after 50 pages, I've just quit. Tastes differ.

The longer the book, the more tentatively I approach it. If "Don Quixote" were only 200 pages long, I'm sure I'd have read it by now. As it is, I have to admit it's not top of my "must read" list.

I'm in my 40s now, so I have had lots of time to get things read. I don't feel inadequate about books I haven't read. I read a lot of non-fiction, and would rather have the broader view that this provides than be able to tick off every single book in the "100 all-time classics" list.

All that said... To some extent it is also about the destination. I think the goal of "getting something done" is common to much enjoyment... For example, I do a bit of computer programming as a hobby, but if I actually ask "Am I really happy?" while I'm doing it, I realise that the satisfaction comes from contemplating the completed task rather than the activity itself.

There are a mere handful of books that I found so compelling I could keep reading them for hours on end without wanting to do something else. ("Tess of the D'Urbevilles" and "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" are two of them.) For the most part, I find reading quite hard work, but satisfying work nonetheless.

[Veho]

There is an interesting point here, that probably deserves its own thread. "At what point is reading a book about the destination rather than the journey." It is so easy to get caught up in "I have to read this classic, than this one, and my friends are talking about this book so I have to read it, and then this one." that it becomes more about having read a book than reading a book.

Do you read "War and Peace" to have had the experience of reading War and Peace? Or do you read it to.....read it? We are living in a world where everything is instantly delivered to us - except books. Books still take the time (and subsequent energy) to consume.

And while I think we can say that we all love reading here, do we get caught up in the idea of the destination we forget about the journey?

I think we would all love to say "well of course I read books for the journey, because that's what reading is," but have you ever had the experience where your "to read" list grows so fast that you feel like you have to keep up?

I really do agree with this. I think reading for some people who are 'serious' about it, myself included, can tend to make it become about the challenge instead of the, to use your word, journey. I wonder how much of the enjoyment diminishes because of this mindset.

[mal4mac]

Veho- War and Peace will wrap you in a warm blanket and take itself to bed with you- it is just that good. You'll do a little background research on Wiki to catch yourself up to speed. It'll be all you talk about for three months. It's great.

Yes. It really is that good, and not a hard read. If you can read this thread you are ready for this!

[Paulclem]

There is an interesting point here, that probably deserves its own thread. "At what point is reading a book about the destination rather than the journey." It is so easy to get caught up in "I have to read this classic, than this one, and my friends are talking about this book so I have to read it, and then this one." that it becomes more about having read a book than reading a book.

Do you read "War and Peace" to have had the experience of reading War and Peace? Or do you read it to.....read it? We are living in a world where everything is instantly delivered to us - except books. Books still take the time (and subsequent energy) to consume.

And while I think we can say that we all love reading here, do we get caught up in the idea of the destination we forget about the journey?

I think we would all love to say "well of course I read books for the journey, because that's what reading is," but have you ever had the experience where your "to read" list grows so fast that you feel like you have to keep up?

It's one of the reasons I dislike lists - 100 books to read before you expire or canons- etc. It's nice to wander more organically through a series of books - one leading to another if you are following a thread. For example I intended to read War and Peace and so I read a history book - 1812 - about Napoleon's invaision of Russia. This gave me some good context for the book, which I got more out of. It then led onto Hitler's invasion of Russia, and so i read Beevor's Stalingrad, followed by Beevor's book on Vassily Grossman, a red army correspondant who later wrote the novel War and Fate. I then followed this through with Beevor on the fall of Berlin. On that particular thread of reading, I will be getting War and Fate in the future. It was great how the books related to each other such as Beevor's accounts of the red army at Stalingrad and their use of extracts from War and Peace in their newspaper propaganda.

War and fate may well lead me back to Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, which incidentally, I read in my early twenties, but want to revisit as I don't think I got as much out of as I think I should due to my general ignorence at that time of what the Soviet Union was like. .

[blazeofglory]

There is an interesting point here, that probably deserves its own thread. "At what point is reading a book about the destination rather than the journey." It is so easy to get caught up in "I have to read this classic, than this one, and my friends are talking about this book so I have to read it, and then this one." that it becomes more about having read a book than reading a book.

Do you read "War and Peace" to have had the experience of reading War and Peace? Or do you read it to.....read it? We are living in a world where everything is instantly delivered to us - except books. Books still take the time (and subsequent energy) to consume.

And while I think we can say that we all love reading here, do we get caught up in the idea of the destination we forget about the journey?

I think we would all love to say "well of course I read books for the journey, because that's what reading is," but have you ever had the experience where your "to read" list grows so fast that you feel like you have to keep up?

This is really a good point of course and that really demands a great deal of contemplation and indeed you have raised my mind to one more book I always took to my attention and the project of reading the book is really tiresome. It is really cumbersome to read a book from the lens of the destination and of course a book like Ulysses is generally read to pride on the fact that one has read number one book without enjoying it. But there an allure of style at times. I like the Great Gatsby for its style mainly. So is Tolstoy and his prose and storytelling is unique and has a history of its own unmatched by any other writers.

[mal4mac]

War and Peace is one of the masterpieces I have always deferred and the reason is it is too bulky and it may exhaust a great deal of my time and energy. I know it has no equivalent; Tolstoy was a matchless writer and his style,his theme and the grandeur of his prose remains unparalleled. But I cannot lose my time to this extent since today by virtue of the fact that I have been born in the century of technological momentum a book like this cannot take away most of my time.

I recently re-read it. It only took a week - OK I didn't do much else that week, but what else would have given me a better time? Playing with my ipod? Nah...

[blazeofglory]

I recently re-read it. It only took a week - OK I didn't do much else that week, but what else would have given me a better time? Playing with my ipod? Nah...

Indeed this is worth doing and if one has time enough and I am mostly busy and when I just try to read a classic of this measure in my little spared time I feel exhausted and that is why I always look toward leisurely hours especially when I have no cares.

[Veho]

I read War and Peace in bits, over a year. I needed a break from it from time to time to read other things. It was a bit difficult reading it this way, because there are a lot of characters, some of whom only appear on a few pages, and therefore it was easy to lose the thread. I ended up making a list of secondary characters on the inside back page.

I admit that also found some bits of it less interesting than others. (The same was true of "Anna Karenina".) But the characters really stay with you, and Tolstoy's understanding of the interaction of character and fate is brilliant.

I never really got that with Anna Karenina and I didn't find the names as confusing as I thought I would, my copy did have a list at the beginning though which is always helpful. You're right about the characters staying with you, especially Anna.

Anyway War and Peace is sounding not too bad actually after all the positive comments but I want to read about the background history before reading it, like Paulclem did.

[Darcy88]

I read 4 Dostoevsky novels when I was 17. Most of it went over my head, I read them as I used to read as a boy John Grisham and R.L Stine. If I had gone on to read Brothers Karamazov at that time or even a few years later it would have been the same. Its a paradox. You must read great literature in order to gradually enhance your reading ability, your capacity for criticism and for picking up nuance, but those first few dozen or more classic books you read are not appreciated as they ought to be. Or at least this was the case with me. There probably is no classic I am not ready for now. I've been reading great books steadily for almost 6 years. That's not to say some won't be very challenging and require slow, careful and maybe multiple readings.

[FranzS]

I recently re-read it. It only took a week - OK I didn't do much else that week, but what else would have given me a better time? Playing with my ipod? Nah...

Cripes. You read 52 times faster than I do. (As I said, it took me a year to read "W & P".)

I'm envious of fast readers and I often wonder why I read so slowly. It's partly that I am easily distracted - by both other activities, and my own thoughts. My mind is often trying to pursue a dozen different trains of thought at once, and they tend to interfere with and undermine each other.

I'm also kind of obsessive about making sure I've taken things in - if a scene is described, I have to ensure that I can picture it before I move on. If I can't work out why a character behaves in a certain way, I have to sit there thinking about it until I feel I understand.

Finally, I have a poor memory for plot; half my time reading is spent flipping back to remind myself how a character got from A to B.

[Desolation]

There's nothing wrong with reading slowly.

Lately, I tend to read finish books at a very good pace. But, it's mostly a matter of myself having the free time required to read 100-150 pages a day. Once I start classes next month, I'll be slowing down pretty substantially.

Even with lots of free time at my hands, it still took me four months to read War & Peace, and a year to finish Anna Karenina, though.

[dysfunctional-h]

I'm envious of fast readers and I often wonder why I read so slowly. It's partly that I am easily distracted - by both other activities, and my own thoughts. My mind is often trying to pursue a dozen different trains of thought at once, and they tend to interfere with and undermine each other.

I've always wondered how fast other people read, because with me it varies a huge amount. Sometimes I'm reading three or four books at once, and in those times it usually takes me a good long time to finish anything. When I was reading 1Q84, The Adventures of Huck Finn, Doctor Faustus (Thomas Mann), and Absalom, Absalom! concurrently it took me a few months to finish even Doctor Faustus, and another two weeks for Absalom, Absalom! and Huck Finn. Then again, these are generally acknowledged to be their respective author's most difficult books. It only took me a week each to finish The Scarlet Letter and The Sound and the Fury. I wrapped up Beckett's Waiting for Godot in a couple fun hours. But with all of these I was not distracted at all--they were the only things I was reading (other than the stuff i read for school, obviously). But other books seem to take longer. Portrait of the Artist took me about three weeks, and Lolita is taking a lot longer than I expected. So I'm not sure. But subject matter is important: because of the main character's lack of moral fiber I find it difficult to get myself to continue reading the book because they are such guilty pleasures. Much of the time I abandon the novel halfway through because I am utterly bored. Such happened with 1Q84, and it almost happened with both Absalom, Absalom! and Doctor Faustus, both of which took a month-long break from while I brought my grades up, and had to review thoroughly before i picked up where i had left off. But it was worth every minute, as those are now two of my all time favorite novels.

I think it's also important to get a background with the author before reading their hardest works. I'm gonna try to read Dubliners before Ulysses, similarly The Crying of Lot 49 before Gravity's Rainbow, and I think reading Absalom, Absalom! (on my father's recommendation) before I attempted The Sound and the Fury helped me not fall in the pit that everybody else does: hating the first chapter because of Benjy, and assuming all Faulkner is like that. There's simply no substitute for doing your research.

[FranzS]

I remember a few years ago, the UK novelist A S Byatt was on a TV arts show, and she said she skim-read a lot of books in order to get through them. She said, "I wouldn't be able to read as much as I do if I didn't skim-read."

I was quite surprised. I don't see the point in skim-reading novels: seems to me you might as well not read them.

I often skim-read news stories, because in that case it's the salient facts I'm interested in, and I can typically get a sense of those from the first sentence of each paragraph. I know I won't remember the detail in a month's time, but with current affairs a general sense of what's happening can be useful.

But in novels - or at least literary novels - surely you want to read them for the quality of the prose, and not just to "get the gist"? Well, that's how I see it, anyway.

(Of course, I'm aware that literary reviewers are obliged to skim-read, insofar as they open the books in the first place - and that, I understand, is by no means a given )

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

I think it's also important to get a background with the author before reading their hardest works. I'm gonna try to read Dubliners before Ulysses, similarly The Crying of Lot 49 before Gravity's Rainbow, and I think reading Absalom, Absalom! (on my father's recommendation) before I attempted The Sound and the Fury helped me not fall in the pit that everybody else does: hating the first chapter because of Benjy, and assuming all Faulkner is like that. There's simply no substitute for doing your research.

Dubliners is a pretty "easy" read. If you find out what's so amazing about it, let me know. If you're trying to prep for Ulysses, though, you may want to read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man because the main character in that shows up in Ulysses, and Homer's The Odyssey since there're a lot of parallels.

As to prep for Gravity's Rainbow, you may want to read V. instead of The Calling if Lot 49 since that too features a character and connections to Gravity's Rainbow, though Lot 49 is really good and quick, so worth a read anyways. Not much can really prepare you for Gravity's Rainbow, though; that book's a trip.

[dysfunctional-h]

Dubliners is a pretty "easy" read. If you find out what's so amazing about it, let me know.

EXACTLY! I read the first chapter I'm just kinda *meh.* But I loved portrait of the artist so there must be SOMETHING to it. I just don't know what. o_oll Maybe it'll become apparent when i read the rest (which is not gonna happen for a while, given all the other stuff enjoy reading).

Speaking of Joyce, Finnegans Wake is hilarious in small shots, but I don't feel like reading it all at once right now, and I don't think it was meant to be read in one shot in the first place. I think it is basically a joke book. But I don't know. To get anything more than that out of it would take a good year out of your life, I'd bet. XD