On long novels

Why I keep choosing the thousand-page book, and how I actually get through it.

People sometimes ask why I bother with very long novels when there are so many good short ones. It is a fair question, and the honest answer is that long books do something short ones cannot: they become part of the furniture of your life.

When you spend two months with a book, it starts to absorb the things around it. I remember exactly where I was sitting for every section of Middlemarch. I remember the weather during the middle chapters of Anna Karenina. The book and the season fuse together, and rereading either one brings the other back.

How I actually get through them, since it is not willpower:

• A fixed time. Thirty minutes after dinner, every night, before anything with a screen.
• A small target. Thirty pages is enough. A thousand-page book at thirty pages a night is done in a little over a month.
• A second, lighter book. For nights when I am too tired, so the habit survives even when the big book does not get opened.
• No guilt about pausing. I put War and Peace down for three weeks once and it was still there when I came back.

Next on the pile is a sprawling family saga I have abandoned twice already. Third time, as Moby-Dick taught me, is sometimes the charm.