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I like to think I'm an adventurous reader. Or at least a semi-adventurous one. But one thing that can stop me in my tracks is a big book. I mean a long book, the ones known in the book blogging world as "chunksters."
For the last few years there's been a "Chunkster Challenge" where bloggers committ to reading some of these big books. I find it comforting, even though I don't join (I suck at challenges), because it means that I'm not the only one that buys or borrows these books with the intent of reading them and then let them gather dust.
The 2009 Chunkster Challenge was hosted at Feelin' Chunky. (A Novel Challenge will be hosting it in 2010, in case you are interested.) A "Chunkster" is defined as a book that is 450 pages or more and that is ADULT literature (fiction or nonfiction). Yes, that's right. Twilight and Harry Potter don't count. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell does count...it also happens to be one of the books languishing on my shelves. Gone With the Wind is a Chunkster. I remember reading it in junior high. Everyone thought I was nuts, and was unimpressed when I informed them, "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn."
I always have a lot of fun reading through people's reading lists but when I look at the lists people have for the Chunkster Challenge I'm often surprised by how few of the books I recognize. Southern Sassy Things finished six chunksters in the past years and I've hardly heard of half of them. I didn't do much better with Teddy Rose's book list either.
I've been thinking about big books a lot since I bought Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother: Official Biography last week. It's a book that I think qualifies as a tome. It has more than thousand pages, though I must say it's surprisingly light. I don't know how they managed it but I think it weighs less than my copy of Harry Potter And The Order of the Phoenix. I bought in part because I think that she must have lived an interesting life. She didn't just live to be more than 100 years old, she lived an entire century. She was born in 1900 and died in 2002 and I find that kind of fascinating. But another part of me was just blown away by the size of the book. It is thicker than the phone book for the province I grew up in. That's rather impressive.
And scary. It is a big book. I didn't buy it the first night I saw it but it picked away at me. I kept asking myself who would read a thousand page biography of the Queen Mother aside from the die-hard royal family fans. The more I thought about it the more I wanted to read it. It would be a challenge. So I bought it. I've set myself a goal of reading ten pages a night. I've missed the last three nights because I went away for the weekend and the book just does not scream "packable". I had read more than fifty pages the first couple of nights so I'm still mostly on track. If I continue at the rate of ten pages per night it will still take me more than three months to read. It's a tactic I've used with other books, though with fiction to try to stick with chapters.
Do you read big books? Do you have a special strategy for reading them. Or are they no big deal?
Contributing Editor Sassymonkey also blogs at Sassymonkey and Sassymonkey Reads.
