Thick books I have not read

Lately, I've been feeling a bit guilty and/or fraudulent about my reading background. I have read a whole lotta books in my lifetime, both for pleasure and because I've had to. But there are some weighty tomes that other people love that I have not engaged with, whether because they were not something I was assigned or because they felt daunting. (Yes, I worked my way through much of Moby Dick and The Last of the Mohicans--I paid my dues there.)

A friend of mine is an avid re-reader, and she is currently wending her way through War and Peace again. I've read quite a bit of shorter Russian literature -novels, plays, and short stories- in my time, and for a while, I was purely steeped in it. I love Chekhov, and I don't mind a slide to the side to Ibsen (not Russian, but just as depressing and fatalistic). But I've never waded into War and Peace; I ordered a used copy of the translation my friend recommended. It's here, beckoning. But wait, there's more.

I was watching a wonderful movie titled Genius this weekend. It stars Jude Law as the American proto-novelist of the early part of the 20th century, Thomas Wolfe. Colin Firth portrays the editor for Scribner and Sons, Max Perkins, and Nicole Kidman as the much-troubled Aline Bernstein. The film is really focused on Perkins and his relationship with Wolfe, but it also shows us what literature can do, has done, and should do-- in short, how the literature of the time captures the turbulence that was brewing in the soul of America. That all said, I immediately ordered Look Homeward, Angel. I've read a lot of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, and I find myself totally ashamed to say I only knew the title of Wolfe's novel. Again, I feel like a fraud: how do I teach American Literature and not know this work? I will fix this, straight away. 

Yes, it's another thick book. I think I'm moving into a reading period now of wanting to dig into thick books that challenge me. It's been a few years since my last graduate class (amen), and I've spent the intervening time reading widely in poetry and writing a lot. Perhaps my intellectual tank needs filling. I'm tired of what I've been writing, and I suspect that I need to immerse myself in lyric language for a bit to get some new cadences in my ears. I have a to-be-read pile of books waiting for me, but that's okay. They won't go bad. For a while now, I've been reading a lot of historical fiction and some really good nonfiction and biography type stuff. Now that Lent is fast approaching, I will have even more reason to fill my brain with good words. I am turning off the computer and cell phone every evening, and I may as well turn off the TV as well: more time to read. Given 40 days of Catholic-style guilt, I should get a lot done. 

Happy reading,

C