/lit/ - Literature

>>17581049
Also, to add a few more.

Borges seems to have been read to for around two hours a day, according to Alberto Manguel (who was the guy doing the reading). This is after he became blind and his mom was already too old to read much to him. Perhaps he had other people read to him too, I don't know. But Manguel would come every night and spend two hours with him.

I also tend to note that the most voracious time of one's reading is during your youth. Vargas Llosa supposedly read Brothers Karamazov in one day, under the effect of amphetamines. In one of his recent chronicles at the newspaper El País he relates that the coronavirus made him go back to that old rhythm, and he started to read ten hours a day again.

During his last years Nietzsche started to criticize the habit of reading too many books. According to one study he seems to have read one book a week during those years. Maybe he used to read more when he was younger.

One minor poet from my country once said in an interview that he reads around five hours a day.

To judge from his book A Guide to Kulchur, Pound seems to have taken a few days (two weeks? don't remember) to finish reading Aristotle's Ethics. But he read it in Greek and probably read other things too during that period. He certainly read many letters (he was an obsessive letter-writer).

In one of his essays, a critic from my country gives the impression of having finished a 200 page book in one day.

Something I notice: writers don't seem to read as much as some critics do. Looking through my personal library, it seems that the authors who I recall as being the most erudite are never the great poets and novelists, but the critics (Bloom, Steiner, Auerbach, Croce, and so on). I suppose that this makes complete sense, because creation takes too much time.

Pound reportedly spent 6 hours a day on the typewriter, which is also the time Noam Chomsky spends answering letters. Vargas Llosa would usually write between 09:00 and 14:00, and says that he would read at night, though sometimes he'd go to the movies or to a theater.
In Tolstoy's diary he seems to give more prominence to writing than to reading.

>>17563637
>In the course of a life dedicated mainly to books I have read very few novels, and in many cases only a sense of duty has made me find my way towards their last pages. I have always being a reader, and a rereader, of short-stories."

>And I have the impression that a long novel is not only excessive for the reader, who cannot read it at once, but also to the author himself. All of this is a repetition of what was said by Poe: that "There is no such thing as a long poem"; that a long poem is nothing but a succession of short poems; and that aesthetic emotion demands a single reading. I believe that the short-story is able to give us this aesthetic emotion. The novel, on the other hand, gives us a series of emotions, and leaves us only with its memory. I believe, furthermore, that in the short story, as practiced by Henry James, Kipling, Conrad and others, there is space for everything that fits inside a novel. That is to say: it can be as dense, as charged with complexities and intensities as a novel with a lot of enthusiasm. And there comes a moment in which one feel that this reading is, perhaps, less a pleasure than a duty. On the other hand, with the short story this does not happen. The short-story, like the short poem, can give us a sensation of plenitude continuously.

>The length of the novelistic genre does not conform either to the darkness of my eyes, nor to the brevity of human life. I can count the books - the Arabian Nights, let's say, or the Orlando Furioso - in which the essence itself is inseparable from the length, because they give us the certainty that we can lose ourselves in their pages as in a dream or a song; in general, however, abundance of pages is a promise of boredom or mere routine.

I believe he was correct.
To give an example, I was trying to finally read Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow today and I found myself struggling not with the strange beginning of the book, not with the bizarre figure of a giant Adenoid, which I liked, but rather with the amount of useless writing in it: "It is too late". "Cold as ice." "Take him by the gut". "Emptying his mind". These are clichés... This is not powerful writing. There are also too many adjectives. Still, there are great passages even at the beginning, but this is not the question: the question is that the non-essential is arbitrarily mixed with the essential, which slows down reading as well and annoys the critical reader.

/lit/ has an obsession with long novels. Yet here is what Borges had to say about them: https://webs.ucm.es/info/especulo/numero25/borveres.html

I translate (Spanish is not my first language, so forgive me if I make a mistake):

>In the course of a life dedicated mainly to books I have read very few novels, and in many cases only a sense of duty has made me find my way towards their last pages. I have always being a reader, and a rereader, of short-stories."

>And I have the impression that a long novel is not only excessive for the reader, who cannot read it at once, but also to the author himself. All of this is a repetition of what was said by Poe: that "There is no such thing as a long poem"; that a long poem is nothing but a succession of short poems; and that aesthetic emotion demands a single reading. I believe that the short-story is able to give us this aesthetic emotion. The novel, on the other hand, gives us a series of emotions, and leaves us only with its memory. I believe, furthermore, that in the short story [novella?]*, as practiced by Henry James, Kipling, Conrad and others, there is space for everything that fits inside a novel. That is to say: it can be as dense, as charged with complexities and intensities as a novel with a lot of enthusiasm. And there comes a moment in which one feel that this reading is, perhaps, less a pleasure than a duty. On the other hand, with the short story this does not happen. The short-story, like the short poem, can give us a sensation of plenitude continuously.

>The length of the novelistic genre does not conform either to the darkness of my eyes, nor to the brevity of human life. I can count the books - the Arabian Nights, let's say, or the Orlando Furioso - in which the essence itself is inseparable from the length, because they give us the certainty that we can lose ourselves in their pages as in a dream or a song; in general, however, abundance of pages is a promise of boredom or mere routine.

This is from a Brazilian interview: http://filosofia.fflch.usp.br/sites/filosofia.fflch.usp.br/files/publicacoes/Gaia/gaia1.pdf

>Question: Are you an frequent reader of novels?
>Answer: I am not a reader of novels, except for Stevenson, Conrad, Dickens, the Russian novelists. I don't read novels. Novels demand too much effort from me. Now a short story, a short story by Kipling, can be essential. Every word is usually essential. On the contrary, a novel has to justify itself with scenarios, with opinions, with dialogues that are not substantial.
>I begun my life by reading the tales of Grimm - one of the masters of humankind - and books from the Arabian Nights, in diverse translations, diverse idioms. Novels, I've read few. I don't know the novels of Cortázar; I know the short-stories, and hold them in the highest regard.
*The context and the authors mentioned make me think he's talking about a novella ("novela corta"), but the original says "cuento corto".