Category: Personals

Big or Small? A Note on Book Sizes

Occasionally, we have serious discussions about the length of books. In the 19th century, when often people were paid by the penny, writers tended to write awfully long books. These days new fiction tends to hover around the three-hundred-word mark, or not even reach that. I myself rarely read a modern book that is longer willingly, unless I am sure I will enjoy it. But because I am busy with exams, I thought I would take a slightly simpler topic for this post, one that gets less attention, but which is still fun to think about – not the length of books, but the size of them!

I remember my surprise at first seeing a French book someone at school was reading – it was so small! I soon learned that what we have in the United Kingdom (and I presume, in the United States as well) is not a global book-size-format but rather, like the non-metric system we use, a size pretty much unique to us. Studying German and Russian I have been exposed to books of various sizes, including those academic books which for no good reason are bigger than everything else on my shelf – I am looking at you, Princeton University Press.

In general the books we find abroad are smaller than the ones we have here. German books from Fischer or dtv are only slightly smaller than their English translations would be, while the lovely little bright yellow Reclam editions are tiny! Russian books are more formulaic, at least if you are looking for literature, with Azbuka and AST the two main editions. However, I also have a few books from the “little library of masterpieces” series, which are about the same size as the Reclam books, but they are hardbacks and generally longer, being single-volume collected editions or long novels.

I have my final exams right now, so my desk is adorned with the books I will be writing about. On the left are my Russian books. You can see how much smaller they are then the Oxford World’s Classics Chekhov near the top. The blue book is my Gogol – it has all of his stuff in, pretty much, from the early Ukrainian tales, to the Petersburg tales, to Dead Souls and even his plays. Not half bad for such a small book!

What are the advantages and disadvantages of these smaller sizes? One of the clearest benefits is portability. You don’t tend to notice the size of your Penguins or Oxford World’s Classics until you try to put them in a jacket pocket. They do, of course, fit into rucksacks and satchels, but you will look rather silly if you try to put them anywhere else. A thick book will remain thick – or indeed, get thicker – when its size is reduced. But for those shorter books the added thickness is nothing compared to the convenience of actually being able to fit them in one’s pocket.

Short wordcount books look rather out of place in big-sized books as well. A hundred pages in an English-size book generally makes me feel cheated or ripped-off, but when the book is smaller, I tend not to mind. Indeed, the smaller size often allows for smaller texts to be given their own book. The Reclam editions are great for presenting readers with one or two novellas, where an English edition would no doubt demand a whole crowd of them. A small size, then, also helps us focus on what we are reading – it gives each story its due.

I feel more motivated to read smaller books too. Shorter books by wordcount motivate us because we get to finish them quicker. But books of a smaller size achieve the same effect by letting us turn the pages more. Anna Karenina is 1052 pages in my Russian edition, but because the pages were so short, I raced through it. And it was a confidence boost too – I felt like I was a master of Russian because of it! For those of us who are not masters at foreign languages deciphering a long page can often take several minutes – and be hugely demoralising – so smaller page sizes can offer a useful counterweight.

My modern German books. You can see how they are just slightly smaller than the English ones in the centre of the pile. Quite a few of these have appeared in past posts – Cat and Mouse, The Emigrants, Three Women, Some Mann, and Else.

Small books are definitely more suitable for certain types of content, too. The main thing that benefits from a smaller size is poetry. In England we do have the Faber “selected poems” series, and the Everyman poetry hardbacks, but mostly our poetry books are just as big as the rest. Has anyone actually read a poetry book cover to cover? I’ve read Leaves of Grass, my favourite book of poems, like that once and it was a dreadful experience. Poetry needs to be dipped into, and that demands a book size that can be carried with you until the right moment arises. That’s why I have two very small copies of Whitman’s Song of Myself. It lets me carry one around all the time, and then whip it out whenever inspiration strikes.

The main problem of smaller books is that they often also have smaller fonts. However, it’s worth noting that English books are guilty of having small fonts too, or even showing no respect to their margins. My copy of Penguin’s Portable Emerson is particularly guilty of this. German books, which are smaller than their English counterparts, often have larger font sizes than they do, something I very much appreciate. Russian books are more unpredictable on that front. In any case, when it is dark, or we are tired, it’s hard to be grateful for a shorter book when that shortness is achieved by making it harder to read.

My Schopenhauer. Chekhov for scale.

The Reclam editions are particularly bad for this. I have a love-hate relationship with them, truth be told. They are so convenient, so portable, but at the same time can be a real struggle to read. And I do find they look ridiculous when they contain big books – my copy of Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation is, at just over seven hundred pages, reasonably sized compared to some of the monsters I have, such as Heine’s collected poems, which go well over one thousand pages. With that kind of length, you often have the feeling that by the time you’ve actually reached the end of the book you’ll need a new pair of glasses.

In the end, though, I do come down firmly on the side of smaller books, even my Reclams. Their portability, and the increased page-turning , just makes reading them that bit more pleasant. I only wish they were written in English, but I suppose I must just get used to that not being the case! Now, there is one area where I think we in the English-speaking world are particularly lucky with our books, and that is in the notes and annotations which most of our serious literature comes with. The Germans are quite good at this as well, but the Russians are absolutely awful. Often their books don’t even have an introduction, let alone a set of notes. Some of my Russian poetry books don’t even have a table of contents! While I don’t always make use of them when they are there, I’d much rather have them than not.

Anyway, readers, how do you like your books? Rare, medium, well done? Big, or small, or somewhere in between?

Two Years of Mostly About Stories

Mostly About Stories has been going for about two years now. I was tempted to give a little summary or whatever at the end of the year, but on balance doing it now makes sense. At the end of any year, and especially one such as that which has just passed, there’s so much to go over that the development of a little blog really has no claim to anyone’s attention.

But what is exciting is that this blog is no longer just a little blog at all.

I shouldn’t get ahead of myself. The blog has grown, massively, in relation to itself. As far as its relation to other book blogs goes, I have not the faintest idea of whether I’m doing well or badly here. Well, actually, I have the most recent version of the same survey that I mentioned when I posted one year ago. According to this, in some respects I’m doing quite well indeed.

One year ago, last January, I had 1078 views on the blog for that month, which worked out as 35 views a day. This month, still unfinished, sees me already at 2738 and with an average of 111 per day. This would put me in the top quartile by pageviews according to the survey. Last year, with the exception of a dip in February, every month was larger than the last. Things just built up, slowly but surely. As they should.

I shouldn’t worry about views, but I do enjoy thinking that people read my blog. Last year I had one follower – a friend. This year I have almost twenty, and almost all of them are unknown to me. The same is true of comments. I now have a few. Not a huge amount, but enough to be excited about. Engagement is what I’m after, really, with this blog. I want a place where people read and want to have their say.

Identity

But it is difficult, because the identity problems I mentioned last year are still present. What exactly is Mostly About Stories? I have long analyses, such as my pieces on Benjamin’s “The Storyteller” (still the most popular piece by far), short poems such as this one by Baratynsky, pieces focusing on a particular aspect of a novel like my thoughts on character in Nostromo, and more general pieces, like this one on Misotheism. It is perfectly reasonable for a blog to be varied in its contents. Just as Borges declared that Kafka created his own precursors, so too do I create my own readers. But that tension between a blog that’s a mess and a blog that’s held together by a unity – some stance, or perhaps my own character – is one that I’ve not resolved.

Even so, this year has been good for the blog’s “intellectual” development. I wrote some long pieces I had wanted to for a while, such as my thing on late Tolstoy, and some shorter more conversational pieces, like my thoughts on how many books to read. I wrote on books that I enjoyed, and on books that I studied, as usual. I do still struggle with knowing what to write. With a book that I’m studying, there’s always an element of teaching involved. I want my readers to learn something, and since the books can be obscure or not available in English, they perhaps do. But when it’s a book that everyone is familiar with, or a book that is long, I’m left flummoxed. Last year I read both War and Peace and Wuthering Heights and I had absolutely no idea what to say about them. Everything’s been said already.

This possibly reflects bad reading habits on my part. I’m not sure I quite “got” Wuthering Heights, though I did have stuff to say about it. But I think it also reflects an unwillingness to write shorter pieces. One thing that I’ve been somewhat adamant about in the past is that Mostly About Stories is for longer pieces, of around 1500 words or more. Yet sometimes I don’t have that much to say, or I want to focus on something small. I wanted to write about education in Wuthering Heights but didn’t know how to make it into a good enough size.

This is an idiotic stance to have. People’s attention drops off rapidly at about 1500 words anyway. Why force people to read more? Perhaps in the future I should aim for something like 1000-1500, but ensure the content is good and tight. Or perhaps I should just let each piece take its own length. All of these ideas have merit.

Reading

Last year, which I spent mostly in Russia with a little time in Cambridge at the end, was a good year for reading. John Williams’ Augustus and Butcher’s Crossing, Marilynne Robison’s Gilead, Joseph Roth’s Radetzky March and Job, Richard Holmes’ Footsteps – all of these are books that have left their mark on me, by authors who were mostly new to me. Then there was Sally Rooney, who is exciting even as I’m somewhat ambivalent towards her work.

This year promises more discoveries. My degree at Cambridge finishes in the summer, leaving me for the first time in a very long time completely free to read whatever I want. It is a great opportunity, as well as a great burden. I am confident I will find something to read. I already have a lot of things I want to. Much more befogged lies my future beyond this blog. Do I get a job, do I do a master’s degree, do I run away into the mountains and become a full-time writer? All of these are possible, as are some less pleasant variants. Only time will tell which fate has decided for me.

Anyway, thanks for reading. Come again.

Here’s a dreadful poem for your time:

I’d Rather (by Konstantin Balmont)

I wouldn't want to be a storm, 
There's too much thunder brewing there. 
I'd rather be the dew at dawn, 
Whose quiet peace knows no compare. 

I'd rather be a little flower, 
The kind whose bloom you barely see, 
The kind that spurns the thunder's power
To have its happiness, to be.

Many Books or Few Books?

I have a book buying problem. They arrive, four or five at a time, like clockwork several times a month. Books upon books upon books. There is nothing else, save transport or food, that I really spend money on. The main thing, anyway, is that the books keep coming. At home, the bookshelves of my “library” are overflowing, even with a good part of my collection still at Cambridge, and the floors of both that room and my bedroom are covered with books which only occasionally have consented to let me place them in boxes.

There is nothing wrong with buying books, especially when you read them, of course. I do not read all of the books that arrive, but I would say with cautious optimism that I read about a quarter of those that do. After all, in every case I ordered the books for a reason, so that even those books which I have passed over may continue to hope that I will yet turn to them and say: “well why don’t we finally get to know each other?” I am sure that Hume understands me when I ignore him to pick out a fiction writer, and that George Eliot approves when I turn to the Germans I write essays on instead of to Middlemarch. Their time will come. Well, maybe not Hume’s.

It is difficult to imagine how amazing my collection would be to someone even from just a hundred years ago. The sheer quantity of books is perhaps less impressive than their variety. I have books from hundreds and hundreds of authors, from all around the world, on topics ranging from poetry to history to oil extraction to the finer points of Eastern Orthodoxy. In the days before paperbacks, people had fewer books, and they also tended to have collected editions. When they read, it meant that they read deeply but not widely. They came to know authors, rather than books. These days, we invariably do the opposite.

Nostalgia, especially for what one hasn’t experienced, is a rather dangerous state of mind. But still I often find myself wishing I had fewer books. Even if we subscribe to the various dicta stating that the vast majority of books are rubbish, still there are far too many books to read in this life that common consensus could call amazing. Even if we dedicated our every waking moment to reading we would not even scratch the surface of all there is to read because to really understand the best books we often have to return to them several times, each time excavating a new layer of meaning.

What bothers me in this is that the thought that because there are so many good books, we have forgotten how to read them well. I understand how to read a book. The essays I write at university seem proof of this. But I generally feel like searching for themes when I read is a rather idiotic enterprise. I may find the themes, and I may even have interesting thoughts on them, but that doesn’t mean I understand the book in a deep sense and it definitely doesn’t mean I enjoyed reading it. Books that we come back to, again and again, inhabit us like a kind of spirit. Books that we read, however intensely, on Friday for an essay due in on Monday, do not.

When I was hiking in the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan I had only my Kindle with me, and though I had plenty of books on it too, I decided to focus on one – Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady. Perhaps it was the sheer contrast – of reading one of the world’s most urbane and “civilized” authors so far from anything that he would have recognised as civilization – but I really enjoyed the book. But more strangely, I also understood the book too, even though I was sleep-deprived and stressed. The limitations of the world around me allowed me to read the book as though it was the only book I had – to really care about what was written in it and to give the characters life within my head.

At home or at Cambridge, I am surrounded by books. And whether I want it or not, that fact influences how I read them. Even a book like Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, which I am reading now, and which is designed to be read slowly, in fits and starts, I seem to be racing through, even though I am reading only a few pages each day. When it comes to a work of philosophy, like Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation, which I ought be reading this month and in the next, then I know in advance that I am not going to understand a thing. I always have another book on my mind, distracting me from what’s at hand. Only non-fiction I can get something out of, since with such books one is often looking for facts more than anything deeper. 

One of my favourite times is when I am forced to pack up my books, such as before I go on holiday or back to university. I enjoy packing my books up at such times precisely because I am forced to choose between them. I always have a secret hope that I will select few enough books as to be forced to really spend quality time with them. Each time I am disappointed. I end up ordering books, or else the remaining space on my Kindle starts rapidly diminishing. Try as I might, the desire to read many books outweighs my intention simply to read a few.

It has even started affecting my studies. To answer any of the questions on an exam paper I only need two or three texts – long or short, it does not matter. The questions are so predictable that one really can get by with only having read two texts for each question. I, however, have read far more than that, as my own posts on this blog in these past two years have perhaps indicated. It is now a question of forcing myself to cut down, to focus. If not on two or three texts, then at least on five or six, rather than fifteen.

Forcing myself to reread for the purposes of exams is not the route to a deep understanding or affection for a book either, but perhaps it will help me start on that path. However, I rather doubt that. In my experience, reading for any reason except to enjoy the book for itself makes it impossible to form a real connection with it. It’s a bit like loving a person. As soon as we’re using them for any purpose, however benign, we cannot love them anymore.

There is nothing wrong with reading so many books and ordering so many books except that it does perhaps betray a certain attitude towards life that is unhealthy if left unchecked. Wendell Berry likes to write about the need for limits and a life that has “form”. What he means is a life where we have lived well within certain bounds – mostly those of the community – without letting ambitions or our desires get the better of us, for in those cases our fates will inevitably be disappointment. A life that is focused on quantity, rather than quality, as so many of ours are these days, is a dangerous life because it leaves us no chance to be pleased with what we have. In trying to read everything we end up reading everything badly and nothing well. Books themselves become tools for sounding clever, rather than wise and lifelong companions.

I don’t know what the solution is to my problem. Perhaps I just need to stop buying books. Obviously, I do! I have tried, without much success, such solutions as only buying a new book after I have read an old one. And in recent months I have been reading more, so that the ratio of “read” to “unread” books is improving. But that still does not mean that I am reading well. Alas, time and time again I am reminded that reading is not just about dragging your eye from one side of a page to the other, but instead is an ability that can be made better and more effective with the correct frame of mind and environment.

In the end, I am left only with a kind of hope that once my studies finish and I am no longer obliged to read books, I may be able to read those books that I choose to read with a more honest eye. I imagine doing a master’s degree unrelated to literature somewhere far from my little library and taking only two or three books with me. Perhaps then I will finally read Middlemarch. Not for bragging rights, because I have read it once already, but for my soul, because back then I read it badly and can’t remember a thing. One can only hope.

Readers, what’s the solution?