Sometimes the Great Books can be boring

(ALSO, I'm about to publish a novella)

I’m on the fifth volume of the unabridged Mahabharata. I just finished the Bhagavad Gita, and now the war has finally started. We’re on the first day of battle. Bhishma is in charge. He’s invincible, nobody can kill him. Lots of arrows are flying back and forth.

It is slow going. I’m talking hundreds of pages of sallies and arrow-strikes. If you’ve ever read The Iliad then you know what I’m talking about: all the passages where it’s like Megalos, the son of Thisbo, from the island of Chios, struck at Tisiphone with his sword, the latter caught it on his shield, and struck back at the proud son of the summer isle. Et cetera. For many pages! Actually, The Iliad isn’t that long—it’s maybe one-fifteenth the length of the Mahabharata, so these sections were perhaps only a few pages long, but they always felt interminable.

By the way, I went back to The Iliad to see if I could actually find those boring passages, but now that I’m reading them again, I’m finding them very poetic and beautiful (I own the Fagles translation), so I cannot confidently state that The Iliad actually has objectively tedious passages—just that when I first read it, twelve years ago, I found it to be boring at times (which maybe was my own fault!)¹

Similarly, my experience of reading the Mahabharata at this moment is that it’s very tedious. I’ve included a sample in the footnotes—keep in mind, this is just one paragraph, I am reading pages and pages and pages and pages and pages of this stuff.² Moreover, I’m waking up at 5:30 AM in the morning to read this—I’ll read for a half hour, and really experience very little pleasure.

Things do happen sometimes. Like Krishna took an oath not to fight, but he almost broke it just now, rushing at Bhishma, swearing to kill him. Bhishma is like, please do kill me! I would love if the supreme God, the lord of all creation, was the person who killed me! But Arjuna stops Krishna from doing it. That was interesting. But most of the pages don’t have something like that.

I’m a bit surprised that it’s only after reading something like 4,000 pages of The Mahabharata that I’ve gotten to something that doesn’t interest me. I think the part I’m at is what people imagine the whole Mahabharata is like, but it’s really not!

Still…there is no getting around it. I find this to be quite boring. This is normally the part of a Great Book where I’d start listening on audio at 2.5x speed (as I did for some of the boring parts of the Bible), but here no audiobook exists.

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Ideally, a book should be so absorbing that the text falls away, and you’re not even consciously reading anymore—instead you enter into what John Gardner called ‘the living dream’. You’re in direct communion with the book—the ideas are in your head, the situations are occurring to you, almost like a daydream or a fantasy.³

Most readers find that serious literature (in general) and the Great Books (in particular) do not have this absorbing quality. That’s why even most English majors (who might have considerable experience reading, say, William Faulkner or George Eliot) will often read much lighter work once they’ve graduated. When you’re working long hours as a lawyer or teacher or librarian, you don’t want to spend your evenings reading Milton, because…it’s simply not fun.

Being lost in a book is fun—struggling through Miltonic inversion is not necessarily fun. The Great Books are almost always marked by some kind of learning curve, and overcoming that learning curve requires effort.⁴

I think because many people read these books in school, where they went through the text using brute force, careful skimming, group discussion, and online crib-sheets, folks often don’t realize that the Great Books can be and, indeed, should be quite absorbing!

Honestly, I think many people who are big readers in high school and early adulthood often stop reading (or read much less) precisely because they don’t realize that absorption comes from conquering an initial unfamiliarity with the text. It’s hard to become lost in a world that has no surprises.

Many people have the experience that I myself had, where lighter fare starts to become boring. That’s why Goodreads reviews are often so disdainful—readers punish authors for using tropes or being predictable, without realizing that the reader has themselves outgrown the books that they used to enjoy reading!

I used to love epic fantasy series and military science fiction, but I don’t read them anymore, not because good ones aren’t written, but because I know what’s going to happen. I’ve seen the images and situations before (oh yes, here’s Horatio Hornblower in Ancient Persia, fighting space aliens!) There’s no challenge and, hence, no absorption.

Absorption is, I think, heavily related to the flow state. You become absorbed in a book when it is just-difficult-enough to push your limits.

The Great Books vary quite widely in the barriers that they pose to absorption. It’s much harder to get absorbed in, say, Thucydides than it is in Plutarch. Much harder to get absorbed in Sophocles than it is Euripides. Much harder to get absorbed in Defoe than in Dickens. Sometimes the barrier is the language, but oftentimes it’s simply a matter of structural similarity. Plutarch’s Lives strongly resemble traditional biographies—they look like something we’re used to reading. The same is true of Euripides, his plays can be read as psychological dramas, akin to Ibsen (who strongly reminds me of Euripides both in structure and theme). In contrast, Thucydides’s annalistic style and Sophocles’ high tragedy are just quite different from what we’re used to reading.

Some of that distance is difficult to overcome. I do not think I’ll ever love Sophocles or Aeschylus the way I love Euripides. I recognize that, as Greek tragedians, they might be the superior playwrights, but in terms of providing enjoyable and absorbing reading experiences for the contemporary reader, Euripides is better (although I do intend to re-read them all someday to see if I feel differently, now that I know more about Greek religion and culture). Similarly, I value Thucydides as a source about Classical Greece at its height, but he’s not a writer I refer to or recommend, the way I do Plutarch.

Even with Euripides and Plutarch, there were barriers to understanding. With Plutarch I was quite frequently very lost. I had no idea who Cimon or Alcibiades were. I had to do a lot of googling as I read. With Euripides, I had read Sophocles and Aeschylus first, so I understood immediately a lot of things about the structure and range of effects in Greek tragedy.

It’s a balance. I certainly think it’s possible to read something that’s so much beyond you that it’s simply no fun, and you get no benefit from the book, because you never really enter into the dream. I’m pretty sure that’s where I was with a few of the Great Books (Moby Dick comes to mind).

At the same time, if you expect a book to be immediately or continuously absorbing, then you end up playing it too safe, and you slowly lose the ability to be absorbed at all. Sometimes readers can be too fragile, too quick to be thrown out of a book.

One thing I love about the Great Books is that I feel a lot of trust that these books have something to offer. Even if I’m bored or don’t understand a given section, I have faith there’s some value in working through it. The Old Testament, for instance, contains some of the most intensely boring material I’ve ever read. I’m not even talking Leviticus or Deuteronomy, which are at least engaging because they’re a code of laws. I’m talking about the latter prophets, who comprise something like 25 percent of the entire Old Testament. Christians like the prophets, particularly Isaiah, because they read many of these prophecies as a prefigurement of Christ. For me, they were just too much—endless railing about the calamities to come. But I worked through them (admittedly skimming many of them at 2.5x speed), and I was rewarded when I got to the Ketuvim, which include some of the weirdest and most thought-provoking books in the Bible: Job and Ecclesiastes.

If you’re going to struggle through something, there’s much worse things to struggle through than the Great Books. I have faith that the Mahabharata will get better, just like the Bible got better.

But sometimes it doesn’t happen. I enjoyed the first third of Moby Dick immensely, when it was about Ishmael and Queequeg. Then it started dishing out the whale-facts. I kept with it, but Moby Dick never got better. It continued to be a lot of tedious factoids about whales. Queequeg disappears from the narrative, and then dies quietly. Even Ishmael becomes mostly irrelevant. Probably I just wasn’t ready to read the book yet, but there’s no denying that my experience of reading the final two-thirds of that book was largely an experience of boredom. I read the book! I know what was in it! But I was not engaged. I did not enjoy learning how many buckets of sperm you could pull from the head of a whale. Everyone I talk to about Moby Dick mentions the whiteness of the whale chapter or the one paragraph where Ishmael and Queequeg massage each others’ hands inside the bucket of sperm. Those are indeed great passages! But most of book was not like that.

Still, that was a rare experience. Ninety-five percent of the time, when I’m bored during one of the Great Books, the experience eventually picks up, and I’m happy that I stuck with it.

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On DIY art

A friend has been working for several years now on a musical called LOVE U, about two college fresh-women falling in love. Last Monday, they staged their first performance, a read-through, and I got a ticket. As you know, I am an inveterate hater, so when the singing began I thought, this is fine and all—it's a queer-joy sapphic romantic comedy just like the ones that've proliferated in the YA world recently. But what's the hook?⁵ What makes this special? What makes it worthy of my time?

But the fact is, although I love musicals, I haven't actually gone to see one in maybe ten years (I saw Wicked when it came to SF about ten years ago). The bulk of the musicals I've seen in my life have been amateur productions: high school and college shows. And...I've almost always enjoyed them quite a bit.

In this case, I was profoundly moved. I loved the story, loved the songs, found myself crying several times, remembering how lonely it was in college to watch everyone else hook up and have fun and fall in love. During the performance, I genuinely felt the fist around my heart start to un-clench. I kept thinking, I don't have to feel so ashamed of the years I spent without love—I really didn't know who I was—college was not actually the world's greatest place to question your sexuality, it’s too gossippy, too close, too much of a hot-house for that. I needed the anonymousness of adult life for that.

I was also just very impressed by the fact that this musical existed at all. Like...two people spent years writing the book, putting together the music, and then they enlisted ten other people to invest their time in it. They paid them, but not much! They found a theater, they publicized the show, they sold tickets. In order for this to happen, so many people had to believe so strongly in it. Making the musical required considerable compromises in terms of staging and rehearsal time (I think they only had eight rehearsals). But the end result was incredible. The belief that everyone had in this product really shone through.

Anyway, I hope the show has a future, but who knows! It's very possible that I saw its one and only showing. But I'm glad I did—it's something I'll remember for the rest of my life.

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On the forthcoming release of my novella

This musical is inspired me to think about my own future. I've been writing and publishing these tales every Thursday on Substack. It's been a great way of testing out various styles, tricks and plots, and seeing the reaction. There's a story that Frederick Pohl told about Robert Silverberg—he always felt like Bob was writing formulaic junk that was guaranteed to sell.⁶ So Pohl told him:

"I want you to write the best work you’re capable of, and here’s a chance for you to do it risk-free. If you send me a story and say, ‘Fred, this is the best work I’m capable of, I promise I’ll buy it, no questions asked. Anything you send me like that, I’ll buy. But if I read the story and don’t feel it’s the best you’re capable of, I’ll still publish it, as promised, but after that the deal’s off. Oh, and don’t under any circumstances tell any other writers about this."

And it worked! Bob really cut loose, and he started producing some of his best stories.

That's how I feel about Substack. It's not that people like everything I post (I can definitely feel the difference when a tale hits versus when it doesn't). But their liking or disliking doesn't stop me from writing what I want! Ultimately I am the final arbiter of whether anything is ready or not—something that’s simply not true when you’re aiming at traditional journals and always need an editor’s approval to get something published.

My tales tend to be a mixture of story, essay, and parable. The ones I post on Substack are usually more essay / parable than story. But at the same time, I've been accumulating a stockpile of tales that're more storylike: they have named characters, a conflict, an objective, scenes, and a clearly-defined setting. The very best of these fiction-like tales is a novella, maybe 15,000 words long, about a guy who's halfway between good and bad. He drinks heavily, takes lots of drugs, doesn't work, but he's not particularly messy or angry, and (of course) he's quite attractive to a certain subset of women, because the ladies love a guy who’s dreamy and self-contained. But he’s not a fuck-boy. He knows who he is! He’s intentional about how he lives! You see guys like this all over the place. They're just...slackers. Dreamers.

Anyway, this guy has inherited a house from his dead gay uncle, and his property taxes are way in arrears, and when his ex-girlfriend (who's now a nurse) starts trying to get back with him, he thinks, well, maybe this is it! Maybe I could shape up my life and actually be with her, earn some money, and find a way of living sustainably.

The problem is he’s also dating this other girl, who’s a lot more fun and care-free, and she maybe lives with him? Also…she might be trying to kill him. Certainly she’s at least threatened to—though he doesn’t think the threat is serious.

I would describe the story as House of Mirth meets American Psycho, if I thought that description would mean anything to anyone.

The novella is called Money Matters, and my plan is to just send the story out as a Thursday tale. Fifteen thousand words is much longer than the length limit for emails, so it’ll be truncated in your email client, but whoever is interested can just click through and read the story in the browser window. The other option is to serialize it over the course of three weeks, but I dunno, I feel like for every subscriber there is a certain moment when they will want to read it, and when that moment comes they should just be allowed to click through and read the whole thing.

The story is a huge departure from me, in terms of content, structure, and style. It's really not written at all like a work of literary fiction. Instead it's written as simply as if I was telling you the story. It shouldn't take more than an hour-and-a-half to read.

There is no obligation to read the story. I think it's a work of literature—a work with literary merit—but it's also an entertaining story about a guy who might be sociopath or…maybe he’s just a better-than-average guy! Like, maybe his ability to read people is just…empathy.

Anyway, people who care primarily about literary value—they don't read self-published novellas. They read, I dunno, the stories in Best American or The Paris Review. I do think this style could be the start of something very new and special, but I don't expect to convince you of that right now.

Still, I want to begin the process of building some kind of excitement for this longer tale. It really is quite unlike anything else you're likely to read—it's a story written primarily for this medium, for the internet—a story designed to get straight to the point, and to eschew a lot of the pointless contrivances and conventions that make literary fiction so dull and so difficult to read.

Right now I think the release date for the novella will be Thursday, November 1st. But we’ll see—there’s a chance that deadline could slip.

1. From Book Five, of the Fagles. Diomedes is fighting these two brothers, who are the sons of a priest of the god Hephaestus. This is beautiful! A lot more interesting than what I’m reading right now in the Mahabharata—kinda makes me feel like I should reread The Iliad!

They went for each other fast, close range—
Phegeus hurled first, his spear’s shadow flew 
and over Tydides’ left shoulder the tip passed
and never touched his body. Tydides hurled next, 
the bronze launched from his hand and not for nothing: 
hitting Phegeus’ chest between the nipples it pitched him out 
behind his team. Idaeus leapt, abandoned the handsome car 
but did not dare to stand and defend his dead brother— 
and not even so would he have fled his black death 
but the god of fire swept him off and saved him, 
shrouding the man in night so the old priest 
would not be wholly crushed with one son left.

2

‘Sanjaya said, “Bhagadatta, Kripa, Shalya, Satvata Kritavarma, Vinda and Anuvinda from Avanti, Saindhava Jayadratha, Chitrasena, Vikarna and the youthful Durmarshana—these ten warriors from your side fought against Bhimasena. They were accompanied by a large army that had come from many countries. O king! In the battle over Bhishma, they sought great fame. Shalya struck Bhimasena with nine arrows, Kritavarma with three arrows and Kripa with nine arrows. O venerable one! Chitrasena, Vikarna and Bhagadatta struck Bhimasena with ten broad-headed arrows each. Saindhava struck him with three arrows in the joints of his shoulders. Vinda and Anuvinda from Avanti struck him with five arrows each. Durmarshana struck Pandava with twenty sharp arrows. O great king! The illustrious one struck all the maharathas from the side of the sons of Dhritarashtra, brave ones in all the worlds, separately. The immensely strong Bhimasena pierced them with many arrows. He pierced Shalya with fifty and Kritavarma with eight. O descendant of the Bharata lineage! He severed Kripa’s bow, with an arrow fixed to it, from the middle. After severing the bow, he pierced him with five arrows. He pierced Vinda and Anuvinda with three arrows each, Durmarshana with twenty and Chitrasena with five. Bhima pierced Vikarna with ten arrows and Jayadratha with five. He again struck Saindhava with three arrows and roared in delight. Goutama, supreme among rathas, grasped another bow and angrily pierced Bhima with ten sharp arrows. He was pierced by those many arrows, like a giant elephant that has been goaded. The mighty-armed and powerful Bhimasena became angry. In that battle, he wounded Goutama with many arrows. As dazzling as Yama at the end of an era, he pierced Saindhava’s horses and his charioteer with three arrows and sent them to the land of the dead. With his horses slain, the maharatha quickly jumped down from his chariot. In that battle, he released many sharp arrows towards Bhimasena. O descendant of the Bharata lineage! O best of the Bharata lineage! But Bhima used a broad-headed arrow to sever the bow of the great-souled Saindhava into two, from the middle. O king! With his bow severed, bereft of a chariot and with his horses and charioteer slain, he quickly climbed onto Chitrasena’s chariot. In the battle there, Pandava performed an extraordinary deed. The maharatha pierced all those maharathas with his arrows and repulsed them. While all the worlds looked on, he deprived Saindhava of his chariot.

3. One strong objection to the Great Books would be that many of these books weren’t really intended to be read for pleasure. What makes this a strong objection is that it’s true. But, unfortunately, most of the texts are actually a pleasure to read (even in translation), which is in part why they survive! Sometimes, however, the pleasure disappears for sections of the narrative, which is what this blog post is about.

4. Personally I found Milton fun to read! This is a Great Books blog after all! But it certainly took effort to reach the point where I could get lost in his writing, especially since I didn’t have much experience (before Milton) reading poetry for pleasure. It was in reading Paradise Lost that I decided upon my policy of referring as little as possible to the footnotes, because, honestly, they usually have very little elucidation to offer upon the text! Like…Milton’s text is full of references to other things (often stories from the Bible that would’ve been familiar to his reader, but are not familiar to us). We get it. You can certainly spend sentences explaining his references, but it doesn’t necessarily improve our ability to enjoy or understand Milton. I’m glad the footnotes are there if I need them, but I usually don’t refer to them.

What’s nice about the Debroy translation of the Mahabharata is that his (copious) footnotes are usually for things that would genuinely improve or clear up our understanding of the text. For instance, many characters in the Mahabharata are called “Krishna”, which is an epithet the texts often gave to dark-skinned people. Arjuna is called Krishna sometimes. So is Draupadi, the wife of the Pandavas. So is Vyasa, who is their (I think) grandfather. And then there’s the famous Krishna, the god. Sometimes when Krishna and Arjuna are together, during a battle, the text will call them “the two Krishnas”. The footnotes are quite good at explaining which Krishna is around. It’s usually not confusing, especially after four thousand pages, but I found it very helpful in the beginning!

5. The hook is that one of the girls is a bookworm who works at the library, and the other is a college athlete who hates reading, but fakes it because she’s so into the librarian. The athlete has one of my favorite songs in the show, all about how reading is boring and puts her to sleep. I loved it.

6. Fred Pohl is a well-known sci-fi writer and editor whose most famous novel is Gateway. Bob Silverberg is best known for the Majipoor cycle of sci-fantasy novels, but I think most connoisseurs would agree that his stand-alone sci-fi is much superior. Amongst the latter, his best-known is Dying Inside, about a telepath who slowly loses his powers. Gateway is good, but Dying Inside is an absolute masterpiece. I once wrote a story called ‘Alive Inside’ about a telepath whose mental shields (which she uses to block herself from eavesdropping unintentionally) break down right around the time her twelve year old son starts experiencing puberty. Unsurprisingly, no sci-fi journal wanted to publish it.