I love the Best Books of All Time lists that litter the internet, not least for the cheek. Who are they to say what you should be reading? And yet.
A few years ago I found a clickable version of such a list and I was clicking away and wondering where all the time had gone without reading so many of them.
What also came clear is that a bunch of the books that I had, indeed, read, I had read more than once. They were so dear, so key, and here they were gathered together mixed with the nothing nuggets that were the books I hadn’t read. “Ha!,” said my prefrontal cortex, “that can’t be right.”
I figured that I had an unfair something against each book that I’d never touched. Then there were a bunch I’d started over more than once, and loved like a revved but failing motor, and just couldn’t get past the story arc’s first bend. So if I wanted to read more of the list I was going to have to sneak up on myself, in the first case, and push through some barrier in the others.
I ended up reading a lot of them by my supercharged method of reading a book while listening to it. Lookit, there is nothing that is exactly like quietly reading a book to yourself. Reading a book to your wife doesn’t count as that, nor does being that wife and listening. Why? Because reading alone you actually reread as you go. You are free to, say, cast your eyes over a paragraph to be sure you’ve got the messages, at the very least. More realistically readers are constantly re-reading passages. That’s a big part of what makes reading alone, with your eyes, the gold standard.
And yet. We can argue that it’s no good if a book takes too long to read. You may forget a joke’s set up by the time you get to the punchline. Many other ideas and tensions may build and pay off better if a book is read briskly.
I’m one of those who listens to books constantly — and when I’m reading a book by ear, if it really engages me, I find myself wishing I were reading it. Too bad I simply can’t get myself to sit down with a book for long enough to make a dent, over and over. I used to could. I got a Ph.D. doing it. But these are very different times. Like everyone else, I read the internet. Then I realized I can listen and read a book. I usually have these classics in the house already or can pick up a used one easy, or find one free online. I let the audio read but my eyes follow along. It’s a whole new game.
Even at a hundred hours I consider this speedy reading because it would have taken forever/never without audio augmentation.
One of the books from the list I’ve read this way is a little number called War and Peace. I loved it. I had to start the book a few times before I felt like progressing and then I felt I was doing fine. However, when I read of a well-loved miniseries, I ran to watch at least the first episode, to be sure I had all the characters sorted. Thus aided with images, I was able to listen at times without also reading. I re-listen. More often than not I re-listened to sections because I had lost my place but it amounted to the same thing: I knew the text as well as if I’d read it.
War and Peace runs 61 hours in the production I chose. The book is 1317 pages. I’ll say here that I’m a bit tragically underemployed right now and that makes this lush reading possible. If I were teaching full time or had more writing work, I wouldn’t have the bandwidth. But here we are. Sixty one hours and with all the stopping and restarting, usually with a deep rewind, I surely spent that time and half again listening. There were other times when I just read, and while it was much better to have my own voice reading, at my own speed, it was work.
Not gonna lie, felt long. Mostly fun but one still begins to hunger for the accomplishment of finishing a book. When you finally get to “The End” there is a two hundred page epigraph that you won’t want to miss, it ties up all sorts of loose ends and has some fabulously satisfying scenes, scenes you deserve for sitting through all those hours of longing or bearing with a vengeful rage on behalf of some particular character. So you read that too.
After that, shorter books on the list should be a breeze, but you may not be surprised to learn that by the time I went for War and Peace, there weren’t any really short books left. I turned the little nothing nuggets into friends so quickly that it shocked me each time I’d re-realize that I’d put it off so long. Brave New World, for heaven’s sake.
Each time I’d approach a book I’d have an assumption about it that had kept me away before but they nearly all turned out to be great. The assumptions were, most commonly, that the book was on the list because it was the first of its kind, because it had a huge historical impact, or to represent a language or other category. I’m a feminist but I could still worry that The Bell Jar was number 77, and There Eyes Were Watching God was number 49, because they stood for something, rather than that they are gems of literature. It turns out that they are unforgettable, life-shifting gems of literature. I’m listening-to-and-reading The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison right now and it’s staggeringly great and strange, and the reading by Joe Morton is amazing.
These readings change my world and also allow me to click off a book on the clickable list. I really like checking things off on lists.
As I see it, you should read whatever you like. The unspoken “should” aspect of the Best of All Time lists should be dismissed. But should you decide you want to, these books are quite a ride. The order that the lists seem to create out of the tsunami of books and authors of all time is itself compelling. And the clickable list, oh my.
One of the things I loved best about War and Peace was how the battle would be insane and out of anyone’s individual perception, let alone control, and then after it was over whatever had happened was given a back story, a planned purpose and a reason for the result. It can seem to me that this concocting of reasons for the chaos around us is the chief usage of the human mind.
***
And you, friends, unseen lights of life, have my adoring admiration. Hold it together, don’t hold it together, nobody knows exactly how to grow but it’s probably one of these. So either way, you’re fine. Stay alive and I shall return to encourage you again.
love,
Jennifer