That in turn is really making me glad that I was made to read Anna Karenina andMoby Dick in high school. I really loved both those giant honking books, but does it really make sense for a busy person in the modern world who maybe doesn’t care to dedicate all that much time to classic novels to read them? Seems like it might make more sense to read some short Tolstoy like “Family Happiness” and “Hadji Murat” and then move on to other things. Adding new possible ways to entertain ourselves naturally starts to squeeze out the viability of some old ways. And maybe the long novel is among the squeezed. Which seems in some ways regrettable (which I take it is part of the point of Infinite Jest) but at the same time to really be a feature of the world.See, I think the thing about big novels is that they give you permission to mosey, to start, and to stop. They're usually organized in reasonable chunks, whether they're serials or set-pieces like Underworld. And I happen, as a busy person, to like literary mountains (I also acknowledge that I read extremely fast, and therefore approach this question with my perspective colored by that). I'm old enough to know I'm not going to read everything, and that not everything I read is going to be virtuous. But I like to mix it up. There's no reason Charlaine Harris and A.S. Byatt and Joan Didion can't, or shouldn't coexist. I get different kinds of pleasure from each of them, but I get definitive pleasure from both. Which reminds me it's time to start rereading Posession again for this year's go-round.
The Big Books
I didn't do Infinite Summer, mostly because Infinite Jest never sounded particularly interesting to me. Yeah, I know, but in a world where I can read David Foster Wallace on porn stars and John McCain and lobsters, Infinite Jest felt unnecessary. I like problem novels a lot: Underworld was definitely one of the more rewarding reading experiences I've had in the last couple of years. Art, and nuns, and baseball are just more my alley than junior tennis and addiction is all. But I've been following the exploits of the folks over at A Supposedly Fun Blog on and off, because hey, they're my friends. And I want to take issue with Matt's roundup post on the experience, in which he argues that maybe we're just not suited for big novels anymore: