Impossible to work

A few months ago (read: a year ago) I was at 57th Street Books with Sepoy. We were looking for a book for a present for someone or maybe we were just in the bookstore poking about. But odds are we were there to buy something for somebody since whenever you need to buy somebody a present and you’re in Hyde Park, you always end up on 57th Street looking for a book.

Anyway, we were scanning the shelves in the literature section (one of the best selections in the city, seriously) when Sepoy pulls a big fat tall Penguin edition of William Gaddis’ The Recognitions and says “This is the best American novel ever written.” Since I generally believe that Sepoy has very good taste in reading, I made the impulsive decision to purchase the book without so much as opening it (this is very rare for me, I’m one of those people who read the first and last pages of a book before buying it). I told Sepoy that if the book wasn’t good, I was going to force him to eat it. His response was that I had to read the whole book (all 956 pages of it) before deciding it was not good.

Last summer I wasn’t in the mood to read any long books, so I brought it home and put it on my “to read” shelf where it has sat ever since then, adjacent to the copy of Lanark Sarah loaned to me around Thanksgiving. I finally read that long novel (to be fair, Lanark is a novella in comparison to The Recognitions) and decided that the Gaddis should be the next thing I read.

I do have phases where I want to read long books (2003 was all about Ulysses and Moby-Dick) and I guess I finally made it back round the cycle now. To be fair, I chose to read the Gaddis primarily because I packed all of my books and didn’t want to start a book, finish it and then have to go buy another book before I was moved into my new place.

I need not fear finishing this one too quickly. I’ve been reading for a few days now and I’ve made it all of 30 pages into the book. This is not because it isn’t interesting or well written. It’s just slow to start and somewhat difficult (I read Ulysses at a faster pace). There are tons of allusions in the book (ranging from traditional Protestant Hymns to Greek and Roman Antiquity to T.S. Eliot and that’s just a small sampling of allusions in the first 30 pages) and it can be quite annoying to see something that you know is alluding to something else and not know what it is.

Enter the Internet. Stephen Moore has compiled an excellent set of annotations for the novel that are available for free as part of the Gaddis Annotations. This, of course, slows my reading down even more, but helps out when I’m confused by something in the book.

I foresee the next few months of my life involving reading this book. It’s just a slow book (as any nearly 1000 page tome is allowed to be, at first). So far, it’s been good. Then again, the characters are New England Congregationalists (at least in the first 30 pages they are) and I find both New Englanders and Congregationalists to be highly amusing characters.
Since this book is going to take forever for me read, I’ll probably be talking about it here a bit. Maybe I won’t, but I’m warning you now. If you don’t want to read about it, don’t read about it. If you find the whole business annoying, don’t blame me, blame Sepoy.