Janet Malcolm wrote an entertaining book in 2007 called Two Lives : Gertrude and Alice. It is not a long book, but involves Malcolm in discussing the very long book that Gertrude Stein herself regarded as her finest effort. Malcolm writes, "I think it is safe to say that most well-read people in the English-speaking world have not read The Making of Americans. The book (in its only available edition) is nine hundred and twenty-five pages long and is set in small dense type, forty-four lines to the page. It is believed to be a modernist masterpiece, but is not felt to be a necessary reading experience. It is more a monument than a text, a heroic achievement of writing, a near-impossible feat of reading."
After discussing various famous critics who wrote about the book without reading it, and after quoting the confessions of Stein's own friends and admirers who did not read it, Malcolm describes her own experience: "For a long time I put off reading The Making of Americans. Every time I picked up the book, I put it down again. It was too heavy and thick and the type was too small and dense. I finally solved the problem by taking a kitchen knife and cutting it into six sections. The book thus became portable and (so to speak) readable."
Ammon Shea is the author of Reading the OED, subtitled one man, one year, 21,730 pages. Shea consumed the full-scale 20-volume set of the Oxford English Dictionary, rather than the more familiar micro-print 2-volume boxed set (which would surely have blinded him before he could have completed the project). David Plotz undertakes a similar stunt with Good Book, subtitled the bizarre, hilarious, disturbing, marvelous, and inspiring things I learned when I read every single word of the Bible. Both Shea and Plotz are fitted out with pith helmet and machete, just like Janet Malcolm, in order to send us dispatches, just like she did, from impenetrable jungle depths.
These are not conventional works of literary criticism or commentary. I would call them instead something like Melodramas of the Reading Life. As such, they seem to be a fairly recent phenomenon. Might this be a trend? (My daughter, who works in publishing, has explained how she and her colleagues are always attempting to spot fads and trends either in lifestyle or in thought, because then they will know more about the market for new books.) So what might this trend of mine signify? After considerable pondering, I offer the following guess: in our time, the actual act of reading long heavy books (all-the-way-through-without-skipping-the-dull-parts) is rapidly becoming an obsolete activity, or at best an arcane one. Consequently, those few individuals who still undertake it become imbued – or can at least imbue themselves – with the radiance of heroes. They are rare and strange and strong, like Ulysses or Wonder Woman.
It seems vainglorious at this point to admit that I read The Making of Americans cover to cover in the early 1980s, but it should be added that at the same time (on summer vacation) I was studiously acquiring a tan out in the backyard (very dark tans were all the fashion at that moment – probably for the last time in human history – and I am no doubt paying for it now). During the course of the same tan I read An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, a lightweight at 874 pages. I loved having big fat endless books to read that summer.
It seems vainglorious at this point to admit that I read The Making of Americans cover to cover in the early 1980s, but it should be added that at the same time (on summer vacation) I was studiously acquiring a tan out in the backyard (very dark tans were all the fashion at that moment – probably for the last time in human history – and I am no doubt paying for it now). During the course of the same tan I read An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, a lightweight at 874 pages. I loved having big fat endless books to read that summer.