Literary weight training challenge: Which doorstops will you read this year?
If you think of yourself as a serious reader (or a future serious reader), you have them on your shelves…or your bedside table…or stacked on the floor…or in a box…or doing part-time duty as coffee tables. Big books, thousand-page novels, doorstops, stuff you’ve heard is great and have resolved to read even if it kills you—which could happen if you’re reading in bed and you fall asleep with the book on your face and it smothers you.
We have a number of them in the house—enough to make the question “Have you read all these books?” sting a little. (And we also have the new translations of Proust, but that’s another story.) We picked them up, started reading, finished a few chapters, and then for some reason or other or no reason at all, stopped. It’s not what we didn’t love them; it just wasn’t the right time. (Hmm, that’s a good line for breaking up with humans.)
Of course we’re going to go back and read them. Eventually. We finished War and Peace, and lots of Dostoevsky and Dickens, and The Lord of the Rings (though we were kids and had a longer attention span). We can do this!
When? Uhhhh….
Here’s an idea. Gather those massive volumes you’ve been intending to read as soon as (Put your personal excuse here) and pick the one you’re going to read this year. Then announce your choice in Comments, and we will check on you periodically to see how far you’ve gotten (and give you a collective nudge when you’re flagging). Yes, like a support group. It worked for War and Peace, no?
Our doorstops include:
The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton, 1400 pages with assorted indices. A medical treatise written in the early 1600s, during which it was a popular success. An attempt to cover every form of melancholy, from vainglory to “overmuch study” to diet, the humours, witchcraft and love, and how people have dealt with it.
Why we bought it: It was a birthday present from our friend, a severe melancholiac.
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West, 1189 pages with index. Ostensibly a journal about a trip she took to Yugoslavia just before the outbreak of World War II, Black Lamb is really an examination of the history, culture, politics, and people of the Balkans. West, a novelist and journalist, delved into the troubled relations among the many ethnic groups (Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks, Turks, Albanians, check out the CIA fact book) living in the region (which we’d only heard of because we watch tennis). When war broke out in the Balkans in the 1990s, journalists, diplomats, pundits, anyone who wanted to understand what was happening turned to this book, written half a century earlier.
Why we bought this book: Ted recommended it for a trip to Turkey. If we’d brought it we would’ve incurred overweight baggage charges. (Yeah, yeah, the e-book would’ve been convenient, but we need our arm exercises.)
The Greek Myths by Robert Graves, 794 pages. This we’re definitely going to finish. When we were a kid our parents thought we should be socialized so they would drop us off at our uncle’s house to play with our cousins. It didn’t work. We found a copy of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes in a bookshelf and hunkered down to read it while our cousins played hide and seek, tag, etc. That was our entire education in Greek and Roman mythology. Little did we know that it would serve us in good stead: as a Lit major, we understood the classical allusions.
The Greek Myths goes deeper into those myths and reinterprets them according to Graves’s theory of an ancient matriarchal religion (Have you read From Hell?) The scholarship has been contested, but the book looks like so much fun.
Why we bought it: Excellent comic book-style cover design by Ross MacDonald. And we paid with gift cards, so it was also a birthday present. Our friends are nerds.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
January 20th, 2014 at 10:16
Hi, Jessica. This year, I’m reading mostly classics. I actually have a self-imposed A to Z challenge. I’m done with A (Austen), B (Bronte), C (Carroll), and D (Dickens). So in line with this challenge, my doorstops are George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way, and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho.
January 20th, 2014 at 11:13
– Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (Still impatiently waiting for bookstores to restock this)
– Edith Wharton’s New York Novels (Does this 3-in-1 book count?)
January 20th, 2014 at 12:31
UVDust: Nope, that’s three Wharton novels. Putting them in one volume might not have been a great idea—makes them seem more intimidating than they are.
The House of Mirth: descending the social ladder.
The Custom of the Country: ascending the social ladder.
The Age of Innocence: defending your ladder.
January 20th, 2014 at 12:38
Peter S: Then you’d love the Penguin Drop Caps series, which presents classics in alphabetical order. Only one title per letter, though, so Middlemarch edged out by Moby Dick.
Took us decades to get through Jane Eyre, but we finally cracked it after seeing Michael Fassbender as Rochester.
Enjoy your Victorians and Proust! If you’re looking for madeleines, they’re available at Eric Kayser shops and various Japanese-French, Korean-French pastry shops.
Then you can read all of Balzac! Yikes.
January 20th, 2014 at 15:01
Hi, Jessica. I’d like to join. I want to finish Infinite Jest this year. Thanks!
January 20th, 2014 at 17:24
I’m planning to finish all my Russian lit classics this year so I’ll be reading The Brothers Karamazov next month and War and Peace this March. I’ll also be reading the doorstops-wannabes George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Stephen King’s Duma Key within the year . I’m currently reading The Idiot which gets better and better every page.
January 20th, 2014 at 17:27
No doorstoppers at home but if there is a kind sould willing to loan me one, I would gladly join the challenge.
Jessica, I share the same Fancy Feast predicament. Luckily, a few minutes ago, I found a store at Tiendesitas that still had them. Name of the shop is Pawfect.
January 20th, 2014 at 18:09
Mine’s Bocaccio’s Decameron (trans. J. G. Nichols, Everyman’s Library ed.).
January 20th, 2014 at 22:32
scheherazade: Would you like to take a whack at A Harlot High and Low by Balzac? We thought it was going to be like an Alma Moreno movie directed by Joey Gosiengfiao, say, Bomba Star or Nympha.
It wasn’t.
There’s a blog devoted to his many, many novels, with links to the texts. http://balzacbooks.wordpress.com/
Bonne chance!
January 20th, 2014 at 22:34
marcku: That’s not a doorstop, that’s a collection of sex comedies. Once you get past the one about the guy who pretends to be mute and get a job at a convent where he gets molested by all the nuns, it’s a breeze.
January 20th, 2014 at 22:40
Bitch Please, don’t say “all my Russian lit classics”. Where’s your Gogol-Turgenev-Leskov? Lermontov and Bulgakov? Chekhov (they’re short stories and plays but could well be novels)? Grossman? Krzhizhanovsky? Zamyatin? When it comes to literary heavyweights Russians rule, and great novels that were suppressed under Stalin are being published every month.
You’re doing Karamazov and War and Peace.
January 20th, 2014 at 22:42
ruth: Enjoy! To get into DFW you need to follow the grand slams of tennis.
January 21st, 2014 at 00:21
I read Infinite Jest with an online reading buddy 2-3 years ago and it was fun! Enjoy, Ruth!
Decameron sounds like fun.
January 21st, 2014 at 07:03
jessica: Thanks! Will do!
lestat: I started reading Infinite Jest in 2012 and got to page 500-something. For some reason, I just stopped. I tried to read from where I left off last year, but couldn’t continue. I need to start over. Scheduling it for February since I’m still finishing two books this month.
So many good books out! It’s so hard to choose the book to read next. Just saying, not complaining. Hehe.
January 21st, 2014 at 08:38
Hahaha! I know you are not given to street language, and so I had to look at his/her handle. Bitch Please, haha, and then we consider your message. Hahaha!
January 21st, 2014 at 18:28
@lestat: Decameron is hilarious.
January 22nd, 2014 at 00:08
Momelia: Are you calling us a lady?
We just start hyperventilating whenever Russian lit is discussed haha.
January 22nd, 2014 at 00:10
ruth: Complaining about the sheer number of books out there is a large part of the fun!
January 23rd, 2014 at 06:15
Yes, I would love to read A Harlot High and Low!
January 23rd, 2014 at 19:51
Here’s my list. I picked six:
Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
JR by William Gaddis
Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset
Middlemarch by George Eliot
The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa
And I drool at the sight of those NYRB Classics. I swallow back though because I see that The Anatomy of Melancholy spans two inches.
January 27th, 2014 at 14:33
ruth — i loved Infinite Jest! although i had to read it with an internet device nearby, for the difficult words, and sometimes i had to consult an online guide, where things just didn’t make sense to me (and i didn’t even try to make sense of the bloody game they played at school). it’s part oedipus, part shakespeare, part psychological study of addiction, part world domination strategy, part confession, part grandstanding by DFW of his vocabulary and power with words. harold bloom hates DFW, but i think harold bloom is the god of pretentiousness.
angus25 — i enjoyed the war at the end of the world! it was a little difficult to get into in the beginning, but once the battle was on, it was riveting! as with Infinite Jest, reading it is a bit masochistic, with all the violence.
jessica — i think i will try satanic verses and rainbow’s gravity this year! plus i will try to read one more dostoyevsky. i read crime and punishment a while back, translated by peaver and volokhonsky, and loved it. i think they are magical. (also read their translation of war & peace and anna karenina). i will want to read their translation of the bible haha.
January 27th, 2014 at 22:22
Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin: Just got a copy and must finish before they show the Colin Farrell movie next month!
January 28th, 2014 at 13:09
skrf: Gravity’s Rainbow should be a scream. For Dostoevsky, we love The Idiot in the P/V translation. Demons (The Possessed) is a slog, even in the P/V.
DFW is always worth it. We kept hoping to run into his ghost at grand slam tournaments. The way his friends have dealt with this death: we actually met Jeffrey Eugenides and wanted to slap him for The Marriage Plot (thinly-veiled DFW character). And that Jonathan Frazier essay, what the hell. We’re going to read DFW’s last one, about the accountants (!)…eventually.
We do love Harold Bloom. He has a role to play and plays it grandly.
Bloom student who might’ve been an authority on Pynchon but for show business: David Duchovny.