The Joy of Slow Reading
The stack of the week
I have always devoured books. I bought Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies, the sequel to Wolf Hall, on the day that it was published and had finished it by the next evening. I’ve made multiple treks through The Lord of the Rings since my childhood by reading a book a day—two books in each volume, making a total of six—for a week of reading, leaving the seventh day for the appendices.
As I have gotten older, however, I have started to learn the value of slow reading, especially for books that I am revisiting. Recently, I finished a reading of Middlemarch, probably for the seventh or eighth time since I first read it over thirty years ago, but this time I took months instead of days, a chapter or two before bed each night. I wasn’t in a hurry. I could savor it on the sentence level. It was like taking a walk in the countryside rather than a bullet train. I enjoyed it so much that I have decided that I will always have a slow-reading project, probably mostly as a bedtime treat, and probably mostly books that I’m revisiting.
This is why I am so happy to have found The Stack of the Week, Footnotes and Tangents by
. Simon has spent 2023 leading a slow read of War and Peace on his Substack, complete with commentary, background articles, and discussion chats. In 2024 he is going to do this again, and he is also going to lead slow read of Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy—Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, and The Mirror and the Light. Those of you who know me will have heard me rave about these books at length. I’ve been fairly obsessed with them since the publication of Wolf Hall in 2009, to the point that I’m now writing a book about the body in historical fiction in which these volumes feature prominently.I have found a kindred spirit in Simon, and I am very much looking forward to participating in his “Wolf Crawl” (#WolfCrawl). I encourage you to read along as well by subscribing to his stack. He explains it all in a video in this post:
That’s it for today—short and sweet this weekend, since as I write this, I’m visiting friends in New Orleans, the hometown of my heart, and feeling a bit sluggish after two ridiculously amazing meals today. But I will be back on Wednesday with the next installment of the “Clapping Back to Misogyny” series. If you haven’t yet read
’s guest contribution to the series from this past Wednesday, you can find it here. It’s fantastic.Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet typewriter to yours.
It took me thirty years to finish reading Anna Karenina. I started on the Amtrak train from Boston to DC when I was an 18-year-old college student and I finished as a 48-year-old mother of 5 children. It was an interesting experience to read a book that slowly, with long absences in between. But it made for a beautiful and incredibly unique reading adventure because I was a different reader (as a woman at a different stage of life) at different times of the novel. I had to rewind back and reread and re-experience. Ah... anyway I should write an essay about this or something.
John - the slow read is a magical thing. I believe that Middlemarch was originally released in serial format forcing a slower read before being published as a whole. In any case, you have picked a good one with Simon. I had been following along his slow read on IG since the beginning of the year and he is the one who inspired me to make the move to Substack. Love this platform and community. I am also excited about the Wolf Crawl although for me this will be a first time read.