Read Online More Baths Less Talking by Nick Hornby - Free Book Online

I’ve Been Reading”–induced five-hundred-page cutoff.
    In the interests of full disclosure, I should add that I am a literary fattist anyway; I have had a resistance to the more amply proportioned book all my adult life, which is why the thesis I’m most likely to write is entitled “The Shortest Book by Authors Who Usually Go Long.” The Crying of Lot 49, Silas Marner, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man … I’ve read ’em all. You can infer from that lot what I haven’t read. And in any case, long, slow books can have a disastrous, demoralizing effect on your cultural life if you have young children and your reading time is short. You make only tiny inroads into the chunky white wastes every night before falling asleep, and before long you become convinced that it’s not really worth reading again until your children are in reform school. My advice, as someone who has been an exhausted parent for seventeen years now, is to stick to the svelte novel—it’s not as if this will lower the quality of your consumption, because you’ve still got a good couple of hundred top, top writers to choose from. Have you read everything by Graham Greene? Or Kurt Vonnegut? Anne Tyler, George Orwell, E. M. Forster, Carol Shields, Jane Austen, Muriel Spark, H. G. Wells, Ian McEwan? I can’t think of a book much over four hundred pages by any of them. I wouldn’t say that you have to make an exception for Dickens, because we at the Believer don’t think that you have to read anybody—we just think you haveto read. It’s just that short Dickens is atypical Dickens— Hard Times , for example, is long on angry satire, short on jokes—and Dickens, as John Carey said in his brilliant little critical study The Violent Effigy: A Study of Dickens’ Imagination , is “essentially a comic writer.” If you’re going to read him at all, then choose a funny one. Great Expectations is under six hundred pages, and one of the greatest novels ever written, so that’s not a bad place to start.
    Some months ago, I agreed to write an introduction to Our Mutual Friend —eight or nine hundred pages in paperback form, a terrifying two-and-a-half thousand pages on the iPad—and I have been waiting for a gap in the Believer ’s monthly schedule before attempting to embark on the long, long road. The recent double issue gave me an eight-week window of opportunity to read Dickens’s last completed novel (only the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood came after it) on top of something else, so I knew I couldn’t put it off any longer.
    I first read Our Mutual Friend years and years ago, and didn’t enjoy the experience much, but I was almost certain that the fault was mine rather than the author’s. Something was going on at the time—divorce, illness, a newborn, or one of the other humdrum hazards that turn reading into a chore—and Our Mutual Friend never really started to move in the way that the other big Dickens novels had previously done. (There’s this moment you get a hundred or so pages in, if you’re lucky and sympathetic to Dickens’s narrative style and worldview, when you feel the whole thing judder into life and pick up speed, like a train, or a liner, or some other vehicle whose size and weight make motion seem unlikely.) So I didn’t worry about taking on the commission. I am in reasonable health, my next divorce is at least a year or so away, and I have given up having children, so I was sure that, this time around, I’d see that Our Mutual Friend is right up there with the other good ones—in other words, I was about to read one of the richest, most inventive, funniest, saddest, most energetic novels in literature.
    Two-thirds of the way through, I was having such a hard time that I looked up a couple of contemporary reviews. Henry James thought it “the poorest of Mr Dickens’s