Big Book Fall
The best time to read a book over 600 pages is right now!
A couple of years ago I saw this Tweet from Rachel Syme:
A Big Book! I was immediately delighted and intrigued. Big Books don’t get enough love. A Short Book is easy to love: so easy to fit in a purse or pocket, to read on the train or in a waiting room, so approachable. And there’s the satisfaction of devouring a story all in one gulp. How much was the bigolas dickolas phenomenon last summer helped along by “it’s only like 200 pages”? A fair amount, I suspect. (It is also an amazing book, by the way, if you are looking for a Short Book recommendation—but that’s not why we’re here!)
The world is against them and yet I love a Big Book. I love the sprawl of an epic tome. They intimidate me, they ruin my Goodreads goals, but year after year I find myself drawn to these behemoths. Give me your Lord of the Rings, your Americanah, your Pachinko yearning to be read.
In the replies of Syme’s Tweet was a trove of Big Book recommendations that were quickly added to my TBR. I took special note of repeats—Middlemarch appeared several times, as did Pillars of the Earth which became the inaugural title for a new tradition I started for myself: Big Book Fall.
(it’s exactly what it sounds like: reading a Big Book in the Fall)
Why A Big Book?
The Virtues of Volume
One of my favorite things that long books can do, that shorter books kind of can’t do, is tell a story over the course of multiple generations. It doesn’t just gesture at the past in a sweeping exposition but truly spends time in each era. The past feels so alive and present and urgent in books that do this well, showing how one pivotal moment can keep reverberating for decades.
Another thing: I love sinking into long books. When I can curl up between the pages and live there for a while. I like when my memories of a time or place are tinged with the book I was immersed in, like a double exposure photograph. The summer after I graduated college I read The Once and Future King, and when I think back to that summer I remember daily morning walks across the river, eating cheese sandwiches for lunch in the Harvard Coop break room, the hum of the window A/C in the apartment I was subletting—but I also remember Camelot.
Why Fall?
The Auspices of Autumn
You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.
—C. S. Lewis
I always spend the end of summer wrapped in melancholy, clutching all of the “lasts”—the last Shower Fruit, the last 85-degree day, the last BLT—but then one day, like clockwork, I wake up and the malaise has lifted. I remember that my favorite season has arrived, bringing with it inspiration and desire for structure. “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall,” etc.
To me, fall is the best time of year for any kind of project, but especially reading. It’s the back-to-school energy, the ~dark academia~ energy. The air is crispy, the leaves are crunchy, and all I want to do is put on a giant sweater, pour a giant cup of tea, and read a giant book. Big Book Fall harnesses all of this autumnal motivation for me and puts it toward finally reading a book I’ve always wanted to read but was always able to put off.
Is it a little bit arbitrary? Sure, but Big Book Fall is about acknowledging that there is never going to be a “good time” to read Bleak House, or IQ84, or The Three-Body Problem, or whatever long-ass book I’ve always said I’ll “get around to someday.” Real life is just going to keep happening, and if I kept waiting for a “good time” I would never read a long book again. So why not embrace a slightly arbitrary but seasonally harmonious impulse?
Big Book Fall 2023
Ramona picked up her mother’s book. Moby Dick. “What’s this about?” she asked.
“A whale that bit off a man’s leg,” said Mrs. Quimby. “Our book club decided to read a book we had all heard about all our lives, but had never actually read.”
“Sounds exciting.” Ramona opened the book, which turned out not to look exciting at all. The print was small, the lines were close together, and there were almost no quotation marks. She closed the book.
(I’m Ramona)
Big Book Fall 2024
This year I’ll be reading Middlemarch, a book that’s been on my to-read list forever (it was my favorite college professor’s favorite book!) and jumped to the top of that list after I watched this interview with Min Jin Lee where she called it “The best English-language novel, period.” I’m excited!
What are your favorite long books? I’m always looking for new recs <3
I just finished The Bee Sting! It was my first Big Book in a whileeeee
Big book fall!!!! I need to look through my goodreads and figure out a book to read this year — I haven’t done an 800 pager since high school. I also was just thinking of IQ84 a couple days ago, maybe it’ll be that :)