Falling Slowly

The most curious books to me are the ones which demand to be read slowly. 

I am the sort of person who reads a lot, and what some would call quickly. Each year, I keep a spreadsheet of the books I've read, and from 2008 to 2013, I have devoured, on average, seventy-one books annually. Since I started keeping track in 2008 (The Jane Austen Year), I vowed to read no fewer than fifty books, and have thus far succeeded, while reaching no higher than one hundred books in 2011 (or, The Year I Got a Nook). The fact that I have kept my vow might indicate that not only am I a voracious reader, but a fast one.

This is untrue. I am, rather, a devoted reader. I can, and will, sit immobile for hours, with only the swish and flick of my wrist, the rise and fall of my chest, to indicate that I am even still alive. The reason I finished that book you loaned me in one day is not because I was able to read it in two hours, at that superhuman speed of terrified college students right before an exam; nor is it because I skipped and skimmed, which I abhor. It is simply because I curled up somewhere, all day, and read the damn thing, plodding along at the comfortable pace of Bilbo Baggins, pre-Adventure.

From this habit, I have developed a preference for books which can actually be read in one sitting. Of course, I can't and don't always read books in one sitting. But I seem to be most comfortable picking up ones with no more than around three hundred and fifty pages. For instance, I've recently been tearing through Mercedes Lackey's Five Hundred Kingdoms series. While I think I've only read one of them in one day, I am reassured by the fact that I could do so, if I felt like it. For some reason, this satisfies my shortening attention span, and I carry on.

However, when I pick up a big, fat book – let's say a book of six hundred and one pages, like Steinbeck's East of Eden – I suddenly feel not only daunted, but alarmed. My attention span revolts. I am like a toddler in a high chair, my bib strapped on, my legs secured, watching with my mouth stubbornly pursed as my mother zooms a spoonful of food toward it. Maybe that spoonful of food will be delicious. Maybe it's not pureed peas after all. Maybe it's pudding. Pudding! Glorious pudding! (What do I know about the colors of foods? I'm a baby.) Even if it were my own hand doing the feeding, I don't want to be strapped down here for the lengthy time it's going to take to eat the whole jar of peas-or-pudding. I'd rather grab a cookie so that I can waddle around in my diaper and have done with it. (I'm going to abandon this metaphor now; I could feel it crumbling as it began.)

East of Eden is a beautiful book, much more beautiful than I ever expected, having read other Steinbeck classics in school in a manner much more suited to my baby food metaphor above. But I still freaked out when I brought it home from the library, because I knew I couldn't read it one one day. That meant I had to set page goals, like I did with Victor Hugo's Les Misérables: one hundred pages per day. At least. And then I would be free to do whatever else I liked. Which, for Les Mis, was probably schoolwork. 

I am done with school now, and am unemployed, which means I don't have a whole lot else to do but read. I read East of Eden in three days. Not necessarily because the entire thing is a page-turner – it's not, not entirely. I read it in three days because it was the only way to quell the hounds of my impatience and unease. I had to force myself to read a book that I loved. 

Obviously, that's somewhat problematic. It's problematic that I feel the need to stuff my face to the point of pain, instead of enjoying a normal, comfortable pace of reading. It's problematic that I can't, in almost every case.

Sometimes, with shorter, possibly-read-it-in-a-day books, I try to go slow. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, for instance, was recommended as a book to be savored. The online recommendation that I read told me explicitly not to read it in one sitting. I probably tried to follow that advice, or if not with that book particularly, then any other book like it. The trouble with really good, possibly-read-it-in-a-day books, is that I can't stop myself from finishing them. The pressure of more than a day's commitment gone, the disappointment of discovering nothing more than pulp fiction eviscerated, how can I not carry on into the wee dark hours of the morning, into that exhausting, confusing time when the early birds really do come out early – out of time, just like me? There is something to be said, after all, of finishing a book at three in the morning, and then sinking away almost the very moment you turn the light out.

And so when I say that the books I find most curious are the ones that demand to be read slowly, I think you will understand that this phenomenon is not merely a curiosity, but an epiphany. It is the rarest creature that I ever stumble upon, because each time I do, I have forgotten that such a creature exists outside of mythology. I cannot, in fact, name another book of this species, except for the one that I am reading, on and off, right now: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke.

Perhaps it is too soon to be making this post. I am, after all, only exactly one hundred pages in (a chapter break that pleased me greatly), with almost seven hundred left to go. The day I started it, though, I found myself compelled to prop it somewhere comfortably on my bed, and read aloud from it for several pages, in a terrible, off-puttingly inaccurate English accent. I have been switching off between reading it quickly in my head, and stumbling over the words out loud (I am a terrible speaker), slowing down the process even more than the extensive footnotes do. For the first time that I can remember, I am enjoying the process. I don't mind setting it aside to do other things, read other things. I've preemptively renewed the book from my library, so I have a full month left in which to peruse it. Not only do I feel unstressed about the extended deadline, but in a way, I want to feel every day of it. I want, inexplicably, to take the next thirty-two days to feel this novel patience and indulgence.

I may find out soon that I despise this book, and throw it aside in disgust or boredom. I may indeed discover that it is a page-turner in disguise, and finish it after only a few days of dedicated reading, whenever they may occur. But for right now, as I simultaneously fly through several possibly-read-it-in-a-day books, I am operating under the illusion that Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell will allow me to fall slowly, and breathe in the magic.