Gentle Thoughts

These thoughts are too small to be made into posts, so I just write them down to sort them out and come to better understanding of them.

22/08/2024

Is Life too Short for Long Books?

There is a great number of great books, some of which are short, some of which are medium, and some of which are long. Some books are of the same page length, yet differ in reading time because of a difference in difficulty level (e.g., reading Treasure Island vs. On the Genealogy of Morals). But there are as many difficult long books as difficult short books, so I am classifying books based on reading time instead of on page length. Naturally, in our lives we want to read as many great books as possible, and, as everybody will agree, it is extremely unlikely that one will read all great books ever written, as there is a great number of them and a fair number of them are hidden in obscurity; thus hard to discover. 

So we want to read as many great books as possible, but we can't read all of them. However, one will see that the shorter these great books you read, the more you can actually read. :o This will be countered with the remark that every great book contains about equal insight in relation to its size. But, since this 'greatness' and 'quantity of insight' is ultimately subjective, the response will be that one can never be totally sure of this so said 'greatness' and 'quantity of insight', before he has actually read the book. So, if the reader can never be sure whether he will actually get as much as promised out of it, he can choose to read short books all the time, as the time spent in disappointment will be much less.

But that would mean that we shouldn't read Tolstoj, Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Alighieri, Milton, etc. So there is probably some fallacy here. Is there some other reason, besides its sublimity why we read these long works? Is there a fundamental difference between short and long works? More time for complexity; thus more time for a grander insight? So if we are as often disappointed with short books as with long books, it follows that while we might waste more time in disappointment reading long books, the reward is much greater in the end, resulting in equal insight in relation to reading time as that of short books. 

So no, life's not too short for long books.