In which size definitely matters

“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.”
Oscar Wilde

I adore reading. Ironically, it’s been a part of my life since before I could read, via audio books and my parents reading to me, and I can barely remember a time since when I haven’t had a book on the go. Sometimes, my favourite thing about going to London by myself or to meet someone is that I get to read on the train and I feel completely vindicated in doing so as there is nothing more productive I could feasibly do (my relationship with technology being shaky at best).

 There are many books I can indeed read over and over again: Wuthering Heights, the Chronicles of Narnia, The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets, Little Women, and so many others. They’re like old friends I can fall back on whenever I need some comfort food.

On one level, I agree with Oscar Wilde’s statement above. Without knowing the context, I would fully concur that nobody should be discouraged from re-reading a book they’ve enjoyed. Yes, there are hundreds of thousands of other books in the world which you could be reading instead. Yes, life is potentially too short to read about Christian Grey’s sex-life in Technicolor detail once again. But it’s surely your right to be able to read something you liked as often as you liked: at least you’re reading.
 
Yet, taken another way, I’m not entirely convinced by Wilde’s thoughts. I’ve read many books once only and probably been more affected by them than some of the ones listed above. The Book Thief, for instance, by Markus Zusak, is a brilliantly wonderful novel which took me a while to get around to reading and which I thoroughly enjoyed when I did. The narrative style was so original and involving, the prose so beautiful. Yet I’ve never even tried to read it a second time. Similarly, I’ve never read the Regeneration trilogy by Pat Barker more than once, unless you count random extracts as part of exam papers. It’s almost as though I’m afraid that they won’t live up to the hype I’ve created around them if I were to meet them all over again. This doesn’t mean that these books hold any lesser place in my life than the Chronicles of Narnia – it doesn’t make them any less enjoyable.
 
And then we come to the other section of books which I enjoyed but would never even contemplate re-reading. The section I like to refer to as ‘the bricks’. For some unknown reason, the last two years have seen me reading increasingly large books. As just a quick sample of the kind of beasts I have read since January last year:
 
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen: 570 pages

The Passage by Justin Cronin: 1008 pages

11.22.63 by Stephen King: 752 pages

Under the Dome by Stephen King: 896 pages

The Stand by Stephen King: 1344 pages

 They’ve been varying in quality. Freedom I remember as being interesting in some places and yet utterly pointless in others; The Passage was engaging and had one of the most startling endings in a novel I can remember reading for a very long (made even more startling when I realised it was one of a trilogy, with 688 pages in the second part which hasn’t even been published yet in paperback). 11.22.63 was, frankly, amazing, bested only by Under the Dome which I read in about three days last summer.

And then we come to The Stand, the longest novel I have ever read. It took me nearly a month and in the end, it was almost a sense of not wanting to lose a battle which got me through. I enjoyed it. The characters were engaging, the storyline reasonably interesting, and King’s writing is almost always accessible. Yet I can’t help thinking I’ve missed something. By the time I finished it, I’d almost forgotten what had happened at the beginning. There were some chunks of it which just felt like filler – and indeed, to some extent, were filler as they were initially edited out of the first edition and were put back in about ten years later when the novel was success. In the foreword, King comments upon how pleased he was to share some unseen characters with the reader now and to bulk out those characters which already ‘existed’.

But I wonder why. I can’t help thinking it could all have been easier and quicker, and that in some way I’ve been cheated out of over thirty hours of my life by a self-indulgent need to cash in on an old novel. I’ve set myself a target of reading eighty books this year, and The Stand was only book number four; I fear to even attempt the maths to work out how many I now need to read per week in order to catch myself up!

What I’m trying to say is, I enjoyed The Stand. But there is almost nothing which could induce me to even attempt to read it again.

Life is definitely too short for that.