An unfair advantage

How many people read a thousand-page book?

Our tutoring consultant not long ago finished rereading William H. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. We’re not going to dwell on the subject-matter of the book here, which is how a great nation (however one defines that) made up of millions of intelligent and well-meaning people (however one defines those) was led to genocidal disaster.  We’re concerned with a far more mundane matter: the work is over a thousand pages long.  How many people, nowadays, would tolerate such a long read?

One of our tutor’s colleagues now and then gives his students magazine articles to read, either for background in the subject matter or as tests of reading comprehension.  His rule of thumb is that a one-page article will actually be read; a two-page article, maybe; anything longer, not.  Of course students read longer works when assigned in class.  But a thousand pages?  Unlikely.  One could blame a generation brought up on short videos for having no attention span; but one could say similar things about their grandparents, taught that any story could be brought to a close in a 60-minute TV episode (with time out for commercials).

How long does it take to read a thousand pages?  Estimating roughly, 4 minutes per page gives something under seventy hours, say 35 sessions at two hours each.  Thrice a week gives an elapsed time of 12 weeks, less than a TV season.  Halving the reading-rate or dropping down to twice a week still makes it a comparable effort to following a TV series for a season.

Of course, not every author is as readable as Shirer.  Our tutor rebels at the thought of more than a taste of St. Thomas Aquinas; and even The Rise and Fall will not captivate everyone.  But The Lord of the Rings is of this order, and had a legion of fans before anyone had thought to make a movie of it.  Our tutor took many more months to finish Don Quijote, but that was in the original Spanish.

And think of what opportunities there are for the patient reader.  Instead of a condensed, simplified version of the story there would be the full tapestry.  Beyond simply tilting at windmills there are the full nuance and satire of a hundred episodes.  And there is the delicious prospect (to some students) of correcting the teacher concerning an episode that does not actually exist.  Certainly long reads are often in dense or old-fashioned language.  But one photographer of our acquaintance actually preferred the archaic forms of Le Morte D’Arthur to anything else he’d met in English class.

The consumption of thousand-page books, we think, amounts to something of an unfair advantage in these oversimplified times.  You won’t remember all the details, but at least you will remember that there are details.  And you can come to your own conclusions, instead of someone else’s.  The Rise and Fall is still in print.