Reading Whale-Sized Books

A couple weeks ago I was lucky enough to catch a screening of Raul Ruiz's last film, Mysteries of Lisbon, on its brief (but glorious) theatrical sprint through San Francisco. The film is very much concerned with the passage of time, and all told, your ten bucks gets you 272 minutes (four and a half hours) of entertainment, not counting a 10-minute intermission.

I've never been one to shy away from a long movie, but when it comes to fiction, if a book is longer than 400 pages, it's going to need some really exceptional cover art to get me on board. It's not that I don't believe these books won't be great, it's that I'm a painfully slow reader who hates putting down a book half-finished. If I start a novel that's 900 pages, I could be working on it for a few months. What if it's not brilliant? (On the other hand, as a friend pointed out, this could be extremely cost-effective entertainment.)

But lately I've been developing a taste for long fiction, too. It's nice to be able to really get comfortable inside a book. The high point of my journey has been The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which I really enjoyed. Next, I decided to take a step back in time, and, in the spirit of not-being-intimidated, take a shot at Moby Dick. In my education so far, the book's name has been used as a symbol of impenetrable art, more often than the book itself has fallen under any real discussion for its form or content. So I figured this would be a rite of passage.

Even as a first-time reader, I somehow expected the classic to be dull by way of familiarity, since a lot of the book has become cultural background stuff. Ahab. Crazy. White whale. "Call me Ishmael." Got it. But nothing could have been further from the truth.

The best thing about a massive work of fiction is that we have time to become internally familiar with the way that everything works inside the story-world. I haven't read anything in a series since high school, but I suspect this is always a large part of the pleasure.

On the other hand, you have to wonder about some of Melville's footnote impulses. I'm a little scared of them now. Every so often you get a 500-word gem that starts out. "I remember the first time I saw an albatross…" I'm not kidding.

Are you more likely to pick up a book because it's 190 pages, or because it's 900 pages? What's the longest book you've ever read? Have you ever written a white-whale sized epic? Do you have irrepressible footnote impulses?

– Max