When I was a child I read books front to back. What I read were mainly stories, beginning to end; in the intervening thirty or so years I have only heard of two other methods to approach a story. The first, which I confess I do not understand well enough to attempt, is Theodore Roosevelt’s counsel “simply to skip the bosh and twaddle and vulgarity and untruth, and get the benefit out of the rest.” He gave this advice about the reading of Charles Dickens.
The second method, which I practice with shameful gusto, is to have a short attention span and read the same few pages over and over in each re-attempt. In the past month, I have read from Macbeth (my first try; I have never read it), Othello (I have never read it), Moby-Dick (the same), three different biographies of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis (Camera Girl; America’s Queen; Janet, Jackie, and Lee), two biographies of John Singleton Mosby, The Wind in the Willows, In the Midst of Life, the Harmonium of Wallace Stevens, the Odyssey (trans. T. E. Lawrence), the Iliad (trans. Andrew Lang and Walter Leaf, a banker), various works of Joseph Conrad, and The Greek Way by Edith Hamilton. I have not made it through more than a few chapters of any, though I persist.
The first time I remember reading a book that did not begin on the cover page and end on the final page, the plot progressing on each succeeding page and dependent upon the previous, was probably the DK Eyewitness book about pirates. (For Malcolm Gaskill on what should have been the subject of another DK volume, vampires, see here.) The second was the dictionary. In this way the world of reference books was opened to me. I have an associative rather than narrative mind; and here is an entire genre into which you can dip and emerge feeling productive, and in which poor attention spans are not a crippling limitation because these books are essentially expanded lists. (Honorable mention must also go to the codex, a list of rules; for Sister Carino Hodder on the Rule of Augustine, see here.)
I think I learned in school that lists in themselves, such as the bede-rolls of warrior names into which Homer frequently falls, were to ancient audiences actually the main event, a sort of literary-poetic climax of clashing cymbals and clanging gongs. To us the literary list can generally only build anticipation through judicious use, though some exceptions can be made—such as for the index (or anthology; for our homage to one of the best of that genre, see A New Christmas Garland).
One of the master practitioners of the index art form was published only under the name of her husband, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Baron Dacre of Glanton, in his book Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans. The most famous entry in its index is for Peterhouse College, Cambridge, an institution Trevor-Roper grew to intensely dislike (for the editor on Virginia Woolf, whose father and husband were both Cambridge men, see here); in the index Lady Xandra, his wife, helpfully directs the reader’s interest to such sub-entries as “four revolting Fellows of,” “high table conversation not very agreeable,” and “its new chapel . . . shocking goings-on there.”
