I like ridiculously big books. Not epic high fantasy series, with fifteen volumes of eight-hundred pages each. No, more those crazy, puzzle-box books of literature that I read somewhere can be called “encyclopaedic novels”. Yeah, that’s my niche.
Perhaps it’s like finding a good television series with multiple seasons: it spares you the pressure to have to find something new to read or watch too soon. Perhaps there’s something about the long stretches of almost-non-fiction, the manic shifting of genre and multiplying of little vignettes. Perhaps it’s the sense of being part of a community of other obsessives who latch onto these beasts. Perhaps it’s also the comfort-read factor: returning to immerse myself in a familiar world of characters and places.
Whatever it is, over the last two years, I’ve returned to some of the enormous books that I especially love. Several of these were triggered by podcasts: my re-reading of It by Stephen King, by listening to The Loser’s Club (my guilty-pleasure genre read); my return to James Joyce’s Ulysses by listening to the Friends of Shakespeare and Company Read Ulysses, produced last year for the centenary of its publication; the #conquerKaramazov collective’s discussion of Dostoevsky’s final book on Across the Pond. There were a couple of other books I dug back up without a podcast prompt: Underworld by Don DeLillo and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon (which I subsequently re-re-read with my teenage daughter).
I have also found myself taking on a few first-time Godzilla-sized books: The Corrections and Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen; Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann; Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy; and I’ve just started Les Misérables by Victor Hugo and In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. I can already imagine adding some of these to the re-read list.
What have I discovered this time around? What is it about re-reading big books?
Reconsidering a big book with an older eye
In addition to the killer clown in the sewers, it was also quite eerie returning to It as a grown man, now directly identifying more with the grown-up “Losers” than with their pre-teen selves. It’s bemusing to sit with middle-aged Leopold Bloom as Stephen Dedalus acts like (forgive me) such a pretentious wanker. I no longer had to imagine what it’d be like to be the world-weary Rosa and Sam Clay, making their marriage work as best they can and carving out some kind of sell-out living in the comics industry — in varying degrees, this is the lived experience of me and my peers now.
When you’re young and ambitious, all the over-the-top intensity of these gargantuan novels can both fill you with energy and prepare you for what life has in store. You return to them later on, and you see your own life story reflected back at you.
The meditative benefit of re-reading
Why re-read a book — particularly a big one — when you could just move on to something new? Sometimes it’s just about being pragmatic. When you re-read a book (or re-watch a series), there’s little risk; you know what to expect (unless it’s not as good as you remember it).
More than that, however, there is an element of meditation in becoming deeply familiar with great literature — or at least, literature that you love. Academics in the humanities do it, chewing over and digesting a particular area of expertise, until it reaches their intellectual abomasum. Religious people do it with their sacred scriptures and other devotional and liturgical materials, living their lives in the company of a collection of texts. Put simply: the more you read, the more you find.
Even more than that, as you change and the world changes around you, you discover fresh treasures — or you appreciate insights and observations from a fresh perspective. It was chilling, for example, to read passages soaked with Russian patriotism in The Brothers Karamazov while Ukraine is under siege from Russian tanks; or to contemplate the way that Underworld’s themes of waste and media representation speak directly to our ecologically precarious and social-media-saturated times.
Re-reading does not just unearth the kind of big themes that might be the focus of an undergraduate essay, however. There’s also something meditative and therapeutic about returning to passages that make you smile, shiver, linger, cry. I like having these familiar passages and characters as fellow-travellers with me throughout my life. They are little emotional and intellectual reference points.
What is it about this stuff? Is there some deep archetypal resonance that makes the “Creature-from-the-Black-Lagoon” kill in King’s It somehow, well, grounding? The pleasure of the childhood one-upmanship and affection in Book Ten of The Brothers Karamazov, which grants the reader a kind of reprieve from the rest of the novel’s dark intensity, is just lovely. And what is it about that episode in Kavalier and Clay when they have their minds blown by Citizen Kane? Or the bit in Underworld which recites the names for all the different parts of a standard leather shoe?
There’s a rich and true and soothing experience to be had in revisiting this material — material for which the very form of the ridiculously big and sprawling novel makes space.
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The communal benefits of lingering with a massive novel
The internet has made crazy-big books even better: the number of tools that can enhance your appreciation and understanding of them; the podcasts that discuss and dissect them; the communities of fans you can interact with on forums and social media.
I’ve never been much of a “book club” guy. Book clubs are like the team sports of literature: no thank you. The asynchronous nature of these digital platforms suits me better, and the narrow fixation on a few mega-books I’ve already read is more my bag, as well. Let’s be honest: this is really a version of fandom, isn’t it? Whether it’s going totally wild about Star Trek or the Collingwood Football Club or Don DeLillo or James Joyce, the best experiences of fandom bring about that almost tribal sense of belonging and being understood. Fandom provides a collection of familiar arguments and famous quotes to rehearse yet again.
Some of these monster-novel fandoms even have associated customs — like the celebration of Bloomsday each 16 June with a glass of Beaujolais and a Gorgonzola sandwich. It has both the 1990s telemovie and the more recent films waiting there for you to rewatch (and man, what I wouldn’t give to have a top-notch television adaptation of Kavalier and Clay in my life). I guess, if I wanted to, I could find fanfiction too — has anyone tried to write the sequel to The Brothers Karamazov that Dostoevsky never got to write? Probably.
Puzzling over the hang-ups of the author — and your own
It’s true, every text reveals truths about the author and their context — often unintentionally. Yet the potential for self-disclosure is only increased by the sheer scale of these texts: more and more seeps through. I’ve definitely been aware of this during my last few years of leviathan re-reads. I can’t help but wonder how Dostoevsky himself saw the world. Did it look, through his eyes, like a world full of people constantly yelling, fainting, running in and out of rooms in fits of mania? What is it with Stephen King’s creepy, pervy male gaze and that whole sewer orgy sequence? Or Joyce’s portrayal of Bloom’s predatory behaviour in the Nausicaa episode of Ulysses and the sprawling, gender-fluid, sado-masochistic stretch in the Circe episode?
Hang on, though. What about me? If these are some of “my books” — books I love re-reading, talking about, thinking about — what is being revealed about me?
Is there a gigantic book out there that you read once when you were at university, or discovered on your auntie’s bookshelf, and really loved? Why not dig it out, then, or grab a fresh copy from your local independent bookshops and give it a re-read or re-listen? I’m sure you’ll be glad you did.
Michael James is a novelist and writer. His work has appeared in Overland, époque e-zine, The Suburban Review, and Belle Ombre. He is currently working on his fourth novel.