Every time I resolve to read through a lengthy work of literature, I am reminded of the funniest scene in Temporary Kings, the penultimate book of Anthony Powell’s 12-volume novel cycle, A Dance to the Music of Time. A wealthy industrialist is informed by his doctors that he has less than a year to live. He takes the news manfully and decides to spend his final days locked away in a cottage reading “the best — only the best — of all literatures, English, French, German, Italian, Scandinavian.” Only a month or two after he begins this exercise, the doctors revise their opinion. He is not so sick after all. In fact, he might have decades to live. Relieved by the news, he rises from his study, leaves his books behind, and goes back “to making money, governing the country, and achieving all-time records in utterance of conversational clichés.” He never thinks about literature again.
I first came across that scene several Christmases ago, when I burned through the Dance during the dead evenings of the holiday. I felt the shock of recognition. Like that industrialist, I take on ambitious reading projects. Unlike him (or so I prefer to think), I complete them. For me, the big reading project is not a singular affair. It is an annual challenge that begins during the otherwise empty days between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day. This is a time when I find myself free of work but pressed on all sides by religious and familial obligations and in need of some release. I have found it a necessary coda to the holiday rituals. After the last guest leaves and the wine glasses are cleaned and put away, there is no greater pleasure than sitting down before a big stack of books. Christmas is a time for binge reading, and I look forward to it all year.
I took up this habit about five years ago as a form of shock therapy when I realized that after graduating from college, I had more or less given up on reading regularly. Many people, even those who consider themselves literate, have a similar epiphany a few years into adulthood. It is only natural: Marriage, kids, and work are always conspiring to keep you away from your pastimes, even seemingly low-effort ones such as reading. Fortunately, there is a whole industry devoted to getting erstwhile readers back into the habit. Some gurus propose setting (and hitting) daily page counts. Others advise blocking off an hour for reading each day. The most ambitious make goals for the number of books that they would like to read in a given year. For me, the most effective strategy so far is this: I pick out very long books and then stick with them to the end, no matter how long it takes.
The reasons for my behavior are fairly straightforward. The No. 1 thing that keeps me from reading regularly, and I suspect that I am not the only one here, is that I often don’t know what to read. I go down into my basement, I stare at the big wall of books, and, feeling exhausted by all my choices, I choose indecision … and fool around on my phone for an hour. But, if I know that I am working through the Dance — and that I have just finished the fourth volume, At Lady Molly’s, meaning that it is time to move on to the fifth one, Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant — then the decision is made for me. All I have to do is pick up the book, and I’m off. The idea is always to have some doorstopper on hand. Best of all, this approach allows me to be flexible in how much I read at different times of the year. I binge over Christmas, sure, but come early February, I don’t have that luxury. It doesn’t matter: The Dance is still there, waiting for me, even if only for a few pages. When I am done with it, some other long-haul journey takes its place.
The first project I attempted with this strategy was Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It was a good choice. Even more so than Proust, Gibbon is the ultimate bedtime book. His prose is both stately and comic, and his narrative moves at such a gentle pace that it is possible in an evening to read as many as one hundred pages or as few as 10 with equal satisfaction. The novelist Shirley Hazzard and her husband, Francis Steegmuller. famously read Gibbon aloud to each other in bed. (She took the body text; he took the footnotes.) Nancy Mitford, one of the most sparkling wits of the last century, read him on her deathbed, finding Decline and Fall impossible to put down, until, just a few months before she expired, she confessed, “I got weaker and sadder and in much more pain.” My own reading of Gibbon does not end so tragically. In fact, it mainly occurred in front of a jolly Christmas tree, and I couldn’t help but chuckle at the irony that one of Christianity’s greatest critics was serving as entertainment for one of its most sacred feasts.
Of course, not every massive reading project requires that the books themselves be long. The only requirement is that the full run be big. Hence, the completionist plan, a mode of reading that can carry you from Christmas through the rest of the year. Indeed, one of the most delightful years of my life thus far began with a Christmas of reading through the entirety of Muriel Spark’s oeuvre. Last year I tried out the same thing with the Bloomsbury Group: Virginia Woolf’s essays and diaries, Leonard Woolf’s autobiography, the entirety of Lytton Strachey’s published work. It was a scattershot experience. As with so many things Bloomsbury, these authors led me in a multitude of different directions, including to Virginia Woolf’s own father, Leslie Stephen, whose monumental History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century I brought on a recent reporting trip to Ukraine — and, alas, never cracked open. Maybe I’ll have better luck this Christmas.
DAN BROWN’S CONSPIRACY OF SUCCESS
One year, I rather too ambitiously attempted to branch out into film. I bought the Criterion Collection’s complete box set of Ingmar Bergman’s movies and became possessed of this fantastic idea that I would marathon them all over the holidays. I tried a few, and it just wasn’t the same. There’s something overly demanding about the television screen — especially if it’s playing something as gut-wrenching as Scenes From a Marriage — that no book, no matter how lurid, requires of its reader.
Since that failed experiment, I have stuck with what works: long books in an armchair by the radiator. I do most of my reading late, long after my daughters are asleep. It is then, especially on these long winter nights, that the world outside truly becomes silent and the one inside opens up. The effect is felt most powerfully during the small hours of Christmas Eve, after the blaring pageantry of Midnight Mass and before the squealing joy of Christmas morning. In those hours, I am put in mind of the first Christmas. Once the shepherds went home singing their hosannas and the angels put away their trumpets, Mary reflected on these events quietly, and, as any good reader does, “pondered them in her heart.”
Nic Rowan is managing editor of The Lamp magazine.
