Guest Author - Veronika Walker
When I see The Count of Monte Cristo or Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, my heart skips a beat. I dream of indulging the story-hog inside me with long nights snuggled between the sofa cushions with hot coffee and side of something salty and I break out in goosebumps. Just me and the book of a lifetime.
And then reality sets in. That thing, that monster of a book, is over six hundred pages long. Wait a second, it's even longer than that, counting all the introductory material and the appendices filled with historical background, epilogues, and an author profile. I want to read it all, of course, so that makes the count even more daunting: eight hundred pages. A thousand pages. Twelve hundred.
That's when I turn around and go to the kiddie section.
Why do the big ones - the tomes, as they're justly called - intimidate most readers? Why can't we just sit down and finish what we start, no matter our reading speed or interests?
Perhaps the answer is because reading that much takes work. No matter how interesting the story, life - phone calls, screaming kids, homework, washing windows and toilets, feeding the dogs, making something other than TV dinners - life, in all its glory, gets in the way. And we get discouraged in our reading habits. We reason that we shouldn't be wasting our precious reading time with such a long book. After all, isn't it a better handling of time to read more books with less pages than only finishing one or two massive books every once in a while? And besides, doesn't it look more impressive to have dozens of shorter books on your "Have Read" list than only a few large ones?
Don't let yourself get to this point with your longer books. It's an unfortunate compromise busy readers have to make, length versus quantity, but sometimes we have to do it. So when you do find yourself considering sacrificing the epic for the quick read, you have to find a way to reason away the guilt and justify conquering the tomes.
The trick is to ask yourself whether or not you actually want to find out what happens. Do you care enough about the character(s) in the book that you are willing to trudge through the slower parts of the story in order to find out if the hero succeeds? Are you basking in the eloquence of the author's style and narrative voice? Do you find the narrator humorous, a funnyman storyteller who could make any old plot sound like a masterpiece?
Think about why you're in this predicament in the first place. What made you even consider wading through this monster in the first place? Were you intrigued by the social, ethical, or emotional situation it investigated? Did you find one of the characters' stories gripping you just from the back cover's summary and wanted to know more? Are you from the same background, the same state or country, the same career? Were you looking for a good romp with an action novel, someone or something to cry over in a love story or family saga? Did you just want to be able to say "I read a book over a thousand pages"?
Whatever your reasons, now's a good time to go back to them and think about those goals and questions that raised your curiosity at the beginning. If these have since disappeared into the myriads of words or the monotonous tone of the narrator, then there is absolutely no shame in bidding farewell to the book that made your reading time so miserable. You have better things to read anyway.
(Don't know what books I mentioned above? Check out the links below!)
