Day 1169 – Time to Read a Thick Book?
Wednesday April 1, 2020
214 Days until the election on November 3rd
294 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021
I was talking to a buddy of mine who said he got into the Russian authors and read a lot of them. Wow. If you haven’t read Russian authors let me tell you, their books are like the country they come from.: huge, long, and confusing. I remember Masterpiece Theater when they were doing Anna Karina. Every time I turned on the TV there was Alistair Cooke sitting in a wing chair saying something like “We are now on episode 3,124 of Anna Karina. In this episode …” OMG! Shoot me now. Play catch up? I don’t think so.
I read “Crime and Punishment.” It was tenth grade. It was a slog. But there were times when something happened that I truly got wrapped up in.
I took a Great Courses course on “Great Literature.” In it the teacher said that great literature was oftentimes hard. He was right. I’ve tried “Ulysses” by James Joyce two or three times. It’s too clever, too much playing on words in German and what-not that I don’t understand. I give up in the early morning scene where the milk maid comes in and he’s shaving. (Chapter One, I think.)
I tried “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” and gave up when he went into the listing of fish phyla. Umberto Eco “Foucault’s Pendulum” did the same thing: listed fish phyla and oyster and clam phyla, but by then I was pissed off and slogged through the first eighty or one hundred pages until I got to the interesting stuff. The story revolves around a man waiting in a church (or was it a cathedral?) on a particular night for an event to take place. Then he wonders if he in fact has the right night and he goes through thinking about how, over the years, the calendar has changed, and it could in fact be another night. I thought about Richard Halliburton’s account of being locked in Hagia Sophia one night, wandering in that magnificent space. When the book ended, I realized once again that it was the thoughts of one person, for one night. Wow. And he never explained Foucault’s Pendulum! (And I won’t either. It is left to the student at google time to do so.)
Yes, a big thick book. One that rambles and twists. One to get lost in. Aye, that’s it.
Maybe, I’ll give “Moby Dick” another spin?
214 Days until the election on November 3rd
294 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021
PS The Red Pyramid’s staircase.
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