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The Gentle Pleasure of Reading Anthony Trollope
For days when genius is too exhausting.
I like structure in my recreational reading. When I retired, it became mandatory for me to read biographies of the American presidents, and I read them in order. One pleasure of doing it that way was that the books became an interconnected series. A person would appear as an up-and-coming politician in one book, develop in another, eventually become president and get his own biography. In the books that followed, he would fade away, complain about his successor and wait in vain to be called back into power.
When the presidents became tiresome, I would turn my attention to either literary fiction or mystery novels. When choosing fiction, I like my books long. (I wrote about my love of long novels here.)
Some novels are just long. Others aren’t, but, are part of a series, in which each stand-alone book may be of ordinary length, but reading them all satisfies my craving for long stories. Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, is the most obvious and snootiest example, but Émile Zola, William Faulkner, Lawrence Durrell, John Updike, and many other great writers have written interlocking novels that can, if one wants, be read as a series. When I have the option, I begin at the beginning and read them all.
