In his foreword to the Penguin Classics edition of Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, R.J. Hollingdale starts as follows:
”Why read a book by Nietzsche – not to speak of two books? There are, after all, many other books to read, there are also many other things to do besides read…”
Don’t panic, as this SNLC isn’t about Nietzsche (whew), but more about reading in general. More particularly, reading on a relatively grand scale, as self finally decided to get back to a 7-part series about a teenage boy wizard of English extraction, after a break of several years. 3CM had only gotten through Volume 4, and had 2 more volumes unread on the shelf all this time. (Yet another way in which 3CM is a behind-the-curve loser, since everyone else here has probably read the entire set.) In turn, this leads to issue of reading big series of books, not to mention making the time for such series, as well as wondering why a given set of linked books overall. More, of a sort, below the flip…
Part of the rationale for finally getting to Volumes 5 & 6 of the Harry Potter books was that I was going to be traveling a few times, and would have long spells of ~5 hours to read. Given how big the HP books are, that’s a fairly reasonable time estimate. As it turned out, since I was speed-reading the books and not lingering over every word, I managed to finish a good chunk of a given volume one way on each of the journeys, and knock off the rest partly on the way back, with some time left over to start other non-HP books on the way back home.
Another motivation for reading these volumes was somewhat mercernary, since I was keen to trade these books at the local hybrid new-used store, i.e. to get them out of my place. Fortunately, this actually worked out, as the store took them all. Of course, this leaves 3CM with the task of tracking down Volume 7 and reading that, even though I know roughly what happens to the main characters already, but not in great detail. But as with any novel worth reading, it’s not just about how the plot turns out, but what happens along the way. The HP books aren’t great literature, but they are entertaining page-turners, no small feat.
The point here is the time needed to dedicate oneself to reading such a big set of books, and making the time. If I were doing this on my own, at home, and not on the road, I probably wouldn’t have started on Volumes 5 and 6 as promptly. It’s the enforced situation where I was on the road for several hours that motivated me to get to those books, since obviously I couldn’t really do much else while traveling. Of course, if I do want to get to Volume 7, I’ll probably borrow it from the library. This is also a good source of enforced discipline, since there’s obviously a time limit with the due date.
3CM’s loserness comes, of course, from waiting so long to get to those volumes, years after the fad has peaked. But to add to it, I have several other volumes that are parts of book series that I both have and haven’t started, and am not sure when, if ever, I’ll get to them. Examples include, alphabetically by author (not by degree of difficulty or dedication):
(a) Fernand Braudel: The Identity of France, 2 volumes (haven’t started)
(b) Cao Xueqin: The Story of the Stone (to complicate matters, I have Volume 5 at home, but not Volume 4, which will necessitate borrowing that also – have read Volumes 1-3)
(c) Michael Holroyd: his 3-volume biography of George Bernard Shaw (haven’t started)
And, of course, the granddaddy of multi-volume challenges (excluding Balzac’s La comedie humaine sequence, I suppose): the 7 volumes of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. I’d actually finished, or thought I’d finished, the first two volumes. But to be fair to Proust (not that he’s around to care), if I do go back, I’ll probably go back to the beginning. But if it’s tough enough to carve out time for Harry Potter, think how much more overwhelming it is just to contemplate carving out time for Proust.
And of course, none of this really helps with saving the world, stopping the Repukes from sabotaging a breakthrough in relations with Iran, or their attack on women’s rights and the ACA, on Amtrak funding and research on global climate change. With that, time for the standard SNLC protocol, namely your loser stories for the week….