Voluptuous Winter Pleasures

Indoors, winter need not be monochrome.

Long Days, Long Trails

 

Though winter days be the shortest of the year, they often seem longest, when for days on end we see not the sun. –The voice of that sentence, although I am its author, is an echo of the long book that occupied my bedtime reading for a week, a novel written in the late 19^th century, its story set in the 15^th. But more of that anon!

 

Back to the present year, 2025, Sunny and I encountered a pair of interwoven coyote trails one recent January morning. I noticed that one animal of the pair had veered briefly from the straightaway to leave a circular path before returning to its mate’s side. What was the motivation for that detour? I could spot no clue.

Can you see the circle?

Closeup of tracks

We see—and Sunny Juliet scents—the trails of many neighbors in the snow this time of year. We discovered a wild turkey trail on Christmas Day. Deer, coyotes, squirrels, rabbits, mice, and more live near us all year ’round. It is in winter, though, that the paths they take appear most sharply to me, an eye-dependent explorer.

Her nose tells alerts her to secrets hidden in the snow.

What did you find, girl?

 

Long Creations and Events

 

Thinking how to ease into a discussion of long books, I considered other ways that life’s gifts are enriched by length of time spent on them. Long friendships came first to mind. Then long travels and long residences in particular places: an entire month spent in Paris on my first trip to France; the months the Artist and I spent in our rented mountain cabin in an Arizona ghost town for several winters; past years in Kalamazoo and recent decades in Leelanau. For me there was one year, beginning in January, when I spent an hour each week sitting outdoors in one place, with only a sketchbook in which to make occasional notes, the object being awareness of everything around me in the natural world. Not rushing from one encounter to another or one place to another but immersing oneself over time: That is the common thread, also to be found in reading a long book.

The Artist had a gift for friendship!

Long, Slow Books

 

Are long books also always slow books? Maybe others have thoughts on this question. I do think the long book generally invites slow reading. When I first came across The Flowering of New England, by Van Wyck Brooks, earliest (I believe) of his volumes of American literary history, it seemed to take forever to get underway, and for a while I was impatient at his slow setting of the stage, until finally it dawned on me that this was not mere introduction but the overall pace of the book, and my reading spirit slowed to an almost voluptuous pace as the author carried me back in time. Delicious!

When a friend wanted me to read Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, at over a thousand pages, I quailed at the prospect. “Just read the first hundred pages,” she urged. I was thoroughly hooked long before that, and while I thought the novel would last me a complete summer, the month of June saw me from start to finish. Still, an entire month! At that pace, my year’s reading list would be very short! But the aim of a list is not to make it as long as possible, only to keep a record. (Note: I do wish Seth would make good on his promise of a sequel to that story, and I would happily give it a month or even an entire season!)

 

Book lovers of the long and the slow can hardly omit Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, though I admit I have read and re-read only the first and last volumes of that monumental work. The first volume alone constitutes a long book, not to be hurried through. Proust took pages to describe the angle of light coming through a window, a description which, like descriptions of hand-to-hand fighting in books of swashbuckling adventure, take much more time to put into words than the incidents would take in living time. 

 

But that’s just the point. We’re not in a hurry. We are giving ourselves time! Delicious! And while I read A Suitable Boy in June, winter is the more obvious season for a long, slow book.

 

A Forgotten Classic

 

And now I come back to the sheep I left grazing in the first paragraph of this post. 

 

Describing Charles Reade’s The Cloister and the Hearth is a tall order. It is a love story; a tale of innocence lost and redemption found; an epic of the road and a “buddy movie” on printed pages. It is an exposé of the absurdities of war and religion, as well as an encomium for true bravery and piety; a tale of danger and adventure, with cliff-hanger episodes; and a soap opera of characters we come to know better and better as we progress with them through time and their lives’ changes. How likely is it that the hired assassin would be the husband and father of the woman and child the intended victim saved from death in a storm at sea? How believable that the masked woman seeking to wash the wandering friar’s feet as an act of penitence for her sins would be the woman who hired the assassin to kill this very man? In all of Europe, throughout all the countries encompassed by this meandering, melodramatic tale, a small cast of characters intersect again and again, as in a television soap opera—or, truly, in the stories of Victor Hugo or Charles Dickens—but a reader accepts these amazing coincidences, as we do in Hugo or Dickens, realizing that the meetings are integral to the story being woven, a story in which every page draws us further in. We as readers find ourselves deeply invested in these people and their conflicts. 

 

The single illustration in the Modern Library edition.

What do you think of Chaucer? Maybe find his language difficult? Reade’s on-the-road chapters are written in English close enough to our own that they are much easier to read, with plenty of adventure, danger, violence, humor, and vivid characters that make the Middle Ages seem not so very different from our own times, though there is a strong flavor of Canterbury Tales, as well as echoes of Don Quixote. 

 

I would say more and urge all my friends to seek out this novel, but I realize that an 1880s bestseller, set in the 15^th century, has tough competition with so many new books—and worthy, too!—coming out continuously in our own times. I do, however, recommend it, along with Proust, along with Vikram Seth, along with Van Wyck Brooks, Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, and others. While blustery winds blow, you can give yourself a travel vacation without leaving home.

"Except for outdoor adventures, right?"

Books to Own

 

My last post contained a paragraph on libraries, with the admission that one need not always buy a book in order to read it, and yet all of us who are lifetime readers surely have a few books that we must own. The list may be short or long and would vary from person to person and household to household. In our home, the Artist and I always had more than one copy of Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame, along with its human equivalent, Harlan Hubbard’s Shantyboat. I had my Proust, of course, and the Artist his Painting Nature’s Quiet Places, by Thomas Aquinas Daly. Jane Austen and Jim Harrison share shelf space in our home. How many copies of Malabar Farm have I bought and given away? The Artist loved to read Machiavelli but also the Tao Te Ching. In the last weeks of his life, I had finally persuaded him to read The Little Prince, and as he lay unconscious in the hospital I read aloud to him from one of his lifetime favorites, The Count of Monte Cristo.

 

One reading corner in our old farmhouse

My personal copy of The Cloister and the Hearth, Modern Library edition, will not be offered for sale in my shop. Text block having parted company completely with binding boards, the book came home with me because of that condition, an orphan I could neither sell nor discard, and I am so glad that it did! The condition was another feature that suited it for life in the slow reading lane and led me to begin reading it at last. After all, Modern Library—how could it not be worth my time?

 

Rubber band holds cover to text block on this orphan volume.

Are you immersed in a long book yet this winter? Maybe instead, several of moderate length? What books call your name when the temperature remains stubbornly below the freezing mark for days on end?

 

For my thoughts on the state funeral of former President Jimmy Carter, visit one of my other of my blogs. Thank you for taking this time with me today.

The book I began reading Thursday evening

How Many Pages Are Too Many?

Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie, was a difficult book for me. My problem was not the exotic locale or unfamiliar names but the kind of story-telling employed.

If I cannot help comparing Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children to Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, that’s only in part because both novels are set in India and focus on the time of the country’s independence. Other similarities lie in the novels’ daunting number of pages and a stunning number of characters and settings. In the end, however (and “in the end” here can be taken literally as well as figuratively), although Rushdie’s novel was less than half as long as Seth’s, with Midnight’s Children I kept looking to see how far along I was in the book—not halfway yet! now at the halfway mark! still, how slowly it goes!—and over and over again I set it down and picked up something less demanding for the remainder of the evening, returning to Rushdie the next morning with a sigh and a sense of determination.

In other words, this reading experience was completely different from my happy immersion in A Suitable Boy, a book that captured me on the first page and held me in its steady thrall, although it took me nearly a month to get through its 1400 or so pages. I’ll go so far as to say the length was essential to the spell it cast, because I lived in that book for the time I was reading it.

The truth (about me) is that in film, on the stage, and in the pages of fiction, I gravitate towards the various forms of realism. Material may be romantic, comedic, serious, or tragic, as long as its fictional world is coherent with reality as I know it. By the same token, the further the story moves away from a plausible (if new-to-me) reality, the higher my resistance, which I think is why most works of science fiction and fantasy fail to hold my attention. I tried and tried, for instance, to read The Hobbit, for my son’s sake (at a certain age, it was his favorite book), but while my eyes went dutifully over the book’s lines of type, my mind kept wandering. I never did get very far with it. Station Eleven, on the other hand—yeah, I could see that happening.

The way I see it, at least in Midnight’s Children (I confess to never having tried The Satanic Verses), Rushie is not a modern realistic novelist at all but a fabulist. In addition, he has quite a bit of the early teen bad-boy, Almodovár-like scatalogist in his sensibility, and for me a little of that goes a long way. All of which is to explain why it was that I did not really “get into” Midnight’s Children, a 533-page book in Penguin paperback, until I’d read over 300 pages.

But I did, finally, enter into the fable, falling in with the narrator’s pretense that his own life and its events, from his birth in the same moment as that of India’s independence, were tied to Indian politics and, in fact, brought about the events that befell the country, its leaders, and everyone whose life he touched, which was, of course, everyone! Yes, it’s a lot to swallow! Now imagine (if you haven’t read the book) swallowing not only that basic premise but a world-flood of details large and small, reminders and repetitions, revelations of what has not yet been and will not for sometimes many pages ultimately be revealed (in its own good time and in all its detail), and perhaps you begin to see the challenge a reader is given to get through this book.

I’m glad that I read Midnight’s Children, and I really enjoyed the last 150 pages. Things went better for me then because I at last stopped struggling against where the author was trying to take me.

I’ve always thought it was unfair to criticize an author for not writing a different book than the one he or she wrote. The question to be asked, rather, in this case of Rushdie, is whether or not he succeeded in the task he set himself, and as I closed the book on the last page I thought that he had.

In a way, I thought, as I was finally starting to enjoy the story, Midnight’s Children is reminiscent of Don Quixote. Rushdie, like Cervantes, asks us to believe unbelievable events, and both writers drag readers through numerous passages detailing excretory functions and unlikely mishaps to body parts. I also remember a member of our reading circle saying that she would have liked Don Quixote twice as much if it had been only half as long.

Would I have had a more positive impression of Midnight’s Children had it been only 300 pages long? I don’t think so. Since it took me over that many pages to enter the author’s world, I would have finished a shorter version more quickly but probably have closed the book shaking my head and dismissing the work as sophomoric.

N.B. What I have written today is not a book review! It is not a critical analysis! You might call it a literary confession. But most of us as readers, I think, have personal limitations that affect our reading—style prejudices, genre preferences, interest or lack or interest in certain topics, etc. I’m not talking only about “comfort zones,” but that’s part of it, I guess. Whatever you want to call my resistance in this case, I feel that pushing myself to read Midnight’s Children was the right thing for me to do, and reading all the way to the last page was, for me, its own reward.