Tips for readers: Getting through hard books

Earlier this summer when Cindy Rollins and Angelina Stanford were interviewing me for their Literary Life podcast, I mentioned that I didn’t start reading books that were hard for me till I was in my thirties. They asked me how I pushed through when reading something like that, so I mentioned a fairly recent experience with Charles Williams’ poem Taliessin Through Logres. In that case, I just kept looking for things I was already familiar with, which helped me keep going till I’d become familiar with Williams’ style and the general flow of the story.

I’d like to share some other strategies I’ve used over the years.

About a decade ago I decided to get better acquainted with Flannery O’Connor’s stories. Up until then I’d only read her short story, “Revelation,” but I’d read it many times, first in high school and then again every few years to see if it turned out any better, by which I mean, to see whether I could get to the end of the story without the bad guy turning out to be ME. Our library had the huge Collected Works of Flannery O’Connor—short stories, novels, essays, letters—so I started reading the fiction, and when it got too dark and difficult, I’d take a break by reading the non-fiction. Her essays are so thoughtful and her letters are delightful, sometimes hilarious, sometimes tragic, and I found that getting to know the author as a person made reading her stories easier.

Another thing that has made it easier to persevere though hard books is reading and discussing them with friends, whether this happens in person or over the internet. I read Homer and Virgil and Ovid this way, and am currently working through Plato’s Republic with friends. Knowing we’re going to meet on a certain day, and that my friends will have read the next section, and that they will definitely have interesting things to share about it is very motivating for me!

This one may come as a surprise, but reading aloud to my children has gotten me through some hard things that I had tried and failed to read alone. William Langland’s Piers Plowman, and Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene fall into this category. I read Langland to my older set when they were in high school, but I started Spenser with my younger set much earlier, so I had to do some groundwork before reading the unabridged poem, but knowing that they loved the story and were waiting for the next canto, and sharing their delight in the story, helped me keep doing my part.

This next example is kind of hard to categorize, but maybe I should call it comparing the hard book to something else I already know and love. C.S. Lewis’s Abolition of Man was like this for me. I tried several times to read it and just could not comprehend what he was talking about, and always gave up before I’d gotten even half way through it. But one day when I picked up That Hideous Strength to read for the umpteenth time, I happened to notice the words “Abolition of Man” in the Preface. I don’t think I’d ever read the Preface before, and I was surprised to read, “This is a ‘tall story’ about devilry, though it has behind it a serious ‘point’ which I have tried to make in my Abolition of Man.” This drove me back into that book and finally I could see what he was talking about in there, since I already knew what it looked like from That Hideous Strength.

How about you? How do you manage to read hard books?