There are more books in the world than hours in which to read them. We are thus deeply influenced by books we haven’t read, that we haven’t had the time to read. Who has actually read Finnegans Wake – I mean from beginning to end? Who has read the Bible properly, from Genesis to the Apocalypse?

And yet I’ve a fairly accurate notion of what I haven’t read. I have to admit that I only read War and Peace when I was 40. But I knew the basics before then. The Mahabharata – I’ve never read that, despite owning three editions in different languages. Who has actually read the Kama Sutra? And yet everyone talks about it, and some practise it too. So we can see that the world is full of books that we haven’t read, but that we know pretty well.

And yet when we eventually pick them up, we find they are already familiar. How is that? First, there’s the esoteric explanation – there are these waves that somehow travel from the book to you – to which I don’t subscribe. Second, perhaps it’s not true that you’ve never opened the book; over the years you’re bound to have moved it from place to place, and may have flicked through it and forgotten that you’ve done so. Third, over the years you’ve read lots of books that have mentioned this one and so made it seem familiar.

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When people ask whether I’ve read this or that book, I’ve found that a safe answer is, “You know, I don’t read, I write.” That shuts them up. Although some of the questions come up time and time again: “Have you read Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair?” I ended up giving in and trying to read it, on three different occasions. But I found it terribly dull.

That’s Umberto Eco. What happened to him with Vanity Fair happened to me with Barnaby Rudge.

Worth noting that these are both Very Long Novels–what Henry James liked to call “loose, baggy monsters.” The psychology of feeling that one should, of giving it a go, of wanting it to work, of bogging down, of eventually admitting–if only to oneself–failure, and, finally, at a later date, when the frustration has faded, of doing it all again–that’s a psychology that is, I think, pretty specific to long works of fiction. They demand a lot of your time–and a lot of you. They will color your imagination and dominate your inner dream-scape while you are involved with them. Reading really long works of fiction is more than reading–it’s having a relationship. It’s not surprising that they evoke some commitment anxiety.

There’s a fun piece on reading long classics vs. short classics over at “The Millions.” Here’s Mark O’Connell on being a Slim Prestige Man (the bookish version of being a serial short-term monogamist):

I used to be the kind of reader who gives short shrift to long novels. I used to take a wan pleasure in telling friends who had returned from a tour of duty with War and Peace or The Man Without Qualities with that I’ve-seen-some-things look in their eyes—the thousand-page stare—that they had been wasting their time. In the months it had taken them to plough through one book by some logorrheic modernist or world-encircling Russian, I had read a good eight to ten volumes of svelter dimensions. While they were bench-pressing, say, Infinite Jest for four months solid, I had squared away most of the major Nouveau Romanciers, a fistful of Thomas Bernhards, every goddamned novel Albert Camus ever wrote, and still had time to read some stuff I actually enjoyed.

I was a big believer, in other words, in the Slim Prestige Volume. Nothing over 400 pages. Why commit yourself to one gigantic classic when you can read a whole lot of small classics in the same period of time, racking up at least as much intellectual cachet while you were at it? I took Hippocrates’ famous dictum about ars being longa and vita being brevis as a warning against starting a book in your twenties that might wind up lying still unfinished on the nightstand of your deathbed. Aside from the occasional long novel––one every twelve to eighteen months––I was a Slim Prestige Volume man, and that seemed to be that.

Even when I went back to college in my mid-twenties to do a PhD in English literature, I still relied on a kind of intellectual cost-benefit analysis that persuaded me that my time was better spent broadening than deepening—or, as it were, thickening—my reading . Had I read Dostoevsky? Sure I had: I’d spent a couple of rainy evenings with Notes From Underground, and found it highly agreeable. Much better than The Double, in fact, which I’d also read. So yeah, I knew my Dostoevsky. Next question, please. Ah yes, Tolstoy! Who could ever recover from reading The Death of Ivan Illych, that thrilling (and thrillingly brief) exploration of mortality and futility?

It struck me, reading this, that part of what O’Connell is describing is the psychology of the syllabus. The decision-making process he represents as a personal quirk–and, as the essay continues, as a genuine shortcoming–is one that is enshrined as a necessity in the creation of literature syllabi. If you have fifteen weeks–or thirty class sessions–in which to teach, say, a course on the Victorian novel, you are forced to take the Slim Prestige approach to writers, and use their shorter works as metonyms for their major longer ones.

Those huge 900 page Victorian novels typically take three weeks of class time–and even then students struggle to keep up. You can do that one or two times in a semester, but the rest of the time you have to compromise to keep things moving. This is why so many students know Dickens through the unfortunate Hard Times, Eliot through the painful and atypical Silas Marner, and James through the throat-clearing that is Daisy Miller. It’s a big part of why “reading Conrad” typically equals “reading Heart of Darkness,” and why Joyce’s short stories are so often preferred to Ulysses or Finnegans Wake. And it tells us something about why it’s hard to find reading lists with writers such as Trollope and Thackeray on them. They didn’t do short.

I used to rationalize the Slim Prestige approach with the thought that if I taught a shorter work by a major author whose best work doubles as doorstops, I could potentially create an appetite for more. If I teach this really well, I would tell myself, maybe some of these kids will go read the longer, often more amazing stuff on their own. So much of teaching literature is salesmanship–and in this case, hawking short works as gateway drugs to longer, better ones.