Reader's Digest: November 16, 2024

I struggle with long books.

It’s partly a problem of recall: reading at the pace I do, a 600-pager stretches through a month and minor characters fade from memory, resurfacing like distant relatives, their names and narratives indistinct, at an awkward family reunion.

It’s partly endurance. I read the first installment of Knausgaard’s My Struggle and stalled before I made it to Book 2. I wasn’t bored, but I lost momentum. I was almost relieved to read, last month, that I can skip his new series, which Christine Smallwood found simply tedious:

The multitude of being can shimmer with overwhelming intensity—each of us individual, with our attachments and passions, making our little breakfasts, feeling ourselves so full and large, while each is only a brief and passing blink of existence on our way to a death of which we know nothing and for which we are not prepared—but only if the reader isn’t fighting the desire on every page to close the book and never open it again.

But if I’m honest, p…