In Praise of Long Books: Notes on Stephenson's Quicksilver

As alluded to in the previous post, I've begun reading post-cyberpunk author Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, a 3-part, 3000-page monster exploring a momentous time in Western culture, the late 17th and early 18th centuries, as the Scientific Revolution was struggling to gain ground, banking and paper money were emerging, plagues and wars raging, and white-haired homosexual named Isaac Newton was redefining the universe. Given my obsessive reading habits (a book taking precedence over everything else until I finish it), I can well expect this story line to occupy my thoughts for the next few months, should I take up the whole series.

Which leads me to wonder: what effect does reading a long book have on one's life? Is the result of slogging through 3000 carefully-written pages and labyrinthian storylines -- bragging rights, anecdotes, comment fodder for blogs -- worth the work, attention, energy, and temporal sacrifice? Or is the long-form novel just a specific type of day-in and day-out entertainment, the literary equivalent of watching Seinfeld reruns every night, enough to attune the mind to a heightened level of wit and word-usage, but little beyond that.

One justification is the neurological one: challenging yourself with a new book builds brain mass and new neuro-connections. A second one is more political: holding one's attention for an abnormal duration to a cultural work is profoundly rebellious in a society of 15-minute episodes of Aqua Teen Hunger Force and the Death of the Album. It becomes a sort of narrative glue tying the chaotic moments of one's life together.

Then there is the experience of reading itself. Unlike TV, which presents its confections in a straight-forward manner requiring little interpretation (once one grows used to the addictive flicker of jump-cuts), a book is cipher, a meaningless sheaf of dead trees and ink squiggles until it is apprehended by the literate individual. Rather than actively dumping situation comedies into the passive maw of the couch-surfer, a book passively depends on the reader's active construction of each scene in his head. Unlike the spoon-fed universality of the TV experience (everyone sees Jerry Seinfeld's apartment in more or less the same way), the book, by virtue of its use of linear text to describe non-linear experience, leaves ample room for interpretation, misinterpretation, creative extrapolation, association, etc.

In theory, this capacity to decode could be applied to the real world, where the reader, when not reading his/her book, looks out to read the "text" of the real world. S/he, if an attentive reader, must therefore always suspect that there is something more to his/her experience the s/he is not seeing, just as there is more beyond the book. We know other people will read a book in a different way, therefore we must suspect their experience of the world is different too, engendering in us a certain level of sympathy.

Reading the same book every day, then, puts one in a parallel universe of one's own interpretation, which then feeds back into one's "real" reality, creating a kundalini-like dance-weave of half-visible, half-invisible worldspaces, parcelling each moment into both its narrative components ("where does this Now exist in relation to my life's narrative continuum?") and wholly distinct moments ("how did the narrative continuum lead to this Now?").

A large book is often referred to as a "doorstop" by its self-deprecating author, for good reason: just as a physical doorstop holds a physical door open, the capable tome can hold one's mental doors open as well, allowing oneself to be surprised by a narrative and to the story-like aspects of real life. Grasping decreases, optimistic equanimity increases, and the world is better off for it.

Or I'm just addicted.

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