July 08, 2004
What was I thinking?
Someone pointedly sent me an article from the Observer had some advice for couples choosing summer reading for their holidays.
1. Do not allow him to take any books that are more than 600 pages long. Men toil under the misapprehension that, on holiday, they really will read That Big Book, even though it has been gathering dust on a shelf at home for, ooh, only eight years. If you do let him take it, trouble will follow. Either he'll get sick of it and start stealing your books or he'll plough stubbornly on and you'll have to listen to his sighing over the whir of the cicadas. (The only exception to this rule is The Diary of Samuel Pepys, which could never be long enough.).
I wish I'd read this before my own holiday. Along with D B Pierre's Vernon God Little (which I never opened) and a study of Irish ringforts (Ditto - I was just being pretentious), I brought along John Keay's History of India and Roy Jenkin's biography of Churchill. Now, they're both superb history books, but they're also two hefty doorsteps. Keay's book is about 600 pages long and after wading through the Harrapans, the Aryans, Jains and Alexander the Great's invasion, I've got as far as the Gupta dynasty. In 300 AD! The Kashmir dispute will be solved before I've got to the end. Who was it that said when you buy a book, you think that you're buying the time to read it?
Similarly with the Churchill book - you don't get much change out of a thousand pages. I've read nearly four hundred pages of small, densely typed pages, and it's still only 1923. At least I know there's a happy ending.
Speaking of massive tomes, what's the deal with biographies of Bill Clinton and David Trimble weighing in at around 1,000 pages each. Whatever you think of their achievements, they're no Winston Churchill.
Posted by Monasette at July 8, 2004 11:47 PM