I was delighted to read this morning that “Apeirogon,” a remarkable book by Colum McCann, a favorite author, is long-listed for the Booker Prize. It’s a truly outstanding and prize-worthy book and I’m definitely going to finish it. Someday. Soon.
Why do we not finish books? I can’t be alone in not finishing a book. Or I finish it but only, as with “Apeirogon,” after taking a long break. For a variety of reasons.
One reason is what happened when I read the David Blight biography of Frederick Douglass. The book won lots of awards and had excellent reviews, but I didn’t like it. I’ve heard Blight speak and found him interesting and engaging, but not in this book. What I kept thinking as I read was I wish Ron Chernow had written this. Chernow, who falls in love with his subject, who maybe wants even a little too much for the reader to love him (yes, so far always him), too. He makes us feel we know Grant, Washington, and Hamilton (even before L-MM) and if we don’t completely understand them, then at least we see the human beings they were.
When I read Blight’s Douglass biography I got interesting information, but none of that sense of seeing the person, no sense of how he became arguably one of the most significant people of the 19th century. Here was this remarkable man who, only a few years after he freed himself from enslavement–where learning to read and write was an act of bravery, ingenuity, and luck–was speaking and writing eloquently, persuasively, with great sophistication and who went on to live a life of enormous influence. In search of that person, I took a break from the biography, read Douglass’s three autobiographies, and only then went back to finish the Blight.
Zadie Smith is a whole other matter. Her writing is so gorgeous that I kind of get full, as if I’ve had too much chocolate, and I have to stop. I finished “White Teeth,” but since then I just read until I’ve had enough and then I stop.
Of course there are books I just don’t like enough to go further with. One like that just last week, in fact. I won’t name names: someone worked hard and just because I didn’t like it doesn’t mean other people wouldn’t.
“Apeirogon” is in a category as unique as the time in which I’m reading it. I bought it in March at the wonderful Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi, as I was traveling through the south seeing 1960s Civil Rights history. Square Books is across the street from a Confederate statue, erected in 1907 in retro honoring of those who “gave their lives in a just and holy cause.” Ok, well. I started reading it right away at the end of each long day of sight-seeing.
And then on March 14 I came home. Through an almost-empty airport on a half-empty plane to the world of COVID-19 and shut-down and masks and staying home; a world of illness and death everywhere and venal ineptitude here. How could I then resume reading this tragic story, even one so beautifully written? No, I immediately began immersing myself in plague-related books. And strangely, also books set during the Holocaust, as if I needed the reassurance that people—even fictional ones—have gone through hard times before and survived.
One of these days I’ll finish “Apeirogon.” I only have about 50 pages left. But I want to wait until I can put the sadness before me into the background enough to honor the story Colum McCann is telling, to feel the power of that story’s sadness without the daily sadness intruding.