SansPoint

I have to admit, my reading habits are rather spotty. I have gotten very little reading done in the last few weeks. Some of this is the result of outside forces^[1], though the vast majority of it has been a lack of desire on my part. The book on my active reading list, at the moment, is The Stone Raft by José Saramago. Not, perhaps, coincidentally, I’ve procrastinated on even starting to read it. This particular copy was lent to me by my girlfriend, and has been sitting on various shelves for a good year and a half before I finally cracked it open.

The book itself is really enjoyable, or at least the first 100-or-so pages that I’ve read have been. I am no stranger to Saramago’s visually intimidating style^[2], and it’s not a difficult read by any stretch either. However, comparing this novel to my first exposure to Saramago, The Double, the first was a much more engaging read. It had a slow build-up, but was strangely captivating in a way that Stone Raft seems not to be. I can’t be sure as to how or why the two novels differ in this aspect. A theory which I am going to pluck out of thin air seems that The Double was a much more tightly focused novel—only one major protagonist to follow, and one we get to know very well. The Stone Raft has a wider focus, with five main characters, and the first half-or-so of the book spent collecting them all into the same place.^[3]

Considering this theory some more, the most engaging book I read recently was Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami. Norwegian Wood is an immensely personal novel, focused very tightly on one character, as most of Murakami’s novels are, and we learn a great deal about the narrator. I wouldn’t say it’s his best novel, but I honestly could not put it down. I read it through work. I read it between and during classes. I read it on the train, at meals, in bed… well, actually I managed to finish it in one day’s worth of reading. It was an amazingly satisfying experience to tear through an amazing novel in such a brief period of time. Norwegian Wood, I should point out, is not a long book, 298 pages. but neither is The Double (336 pages) or The Stone Raft (292 pages). Length isn’t a factor in engagement: Infinite Jest had me totally caught up, and that was over 1000 pages, while another 1000+ page novel, Against the Day has been my white whale.^[4]

I have found that it is very hard for me to really break down and focus on any task or activity that I am not fully engaged in, or fully emotionally invested in.^[5] Perhaps it’s the same way with books. If a novel is truly captivating and engaging, I will make the time to read it, rather than try and remember to read it. That, of course, makes all the difference… and yet, I can’t quantify to any certainty what gets me engaged in a novel. My question to you, then, is what makes you, the reader, engaged with a novel? Post your answers in the comments, and maybe something will ring a bell.

1. I’ve recently moved, am going to be moving again in a few weeks (with luck), searching for full-time employment, and had a few other things get in the way of basic pleasure reading. ↩
2. multi-page paragraphs, run-on sentences, no dialogue markers, etc. ↩
3. I’m only at the point where they’ve acquired the fourth member of their party. ↩
4. Moby Dick, however, is not on my immediate reading list. I’ll get to it. ↩
5. My grades in college reflect this well. Any class that I took and had no actual interest in beyond satisfying an arbitrary requirement ended up with a lower grade than a class I actually cared about. As an example, I earned a C Survey of English Literature Part 1 which I really had no interest in once we’d finished discussing “Beowulf”. Survey of American Literature Part 2, however, was my favorite class at Temple University, and my only A+ grade. ↩