Transcript / LoLT: Tips for Reading Long Novels and Two Great Books — 24 January 2025

This is a transcription of LoLT: Tips for Reading Long Novels and Two Great Books — 24 January 2025

[cheerful music]

Melissa: Coming up, a gossipy history of English country houses.

David: A coming-of-age in 1980s New York.

Melissa: Plus, our Distraction of the Week. I’m Mel.

David: I’m Dave. This is The Library of Lost Time.

Melissa: Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been devouring all the manor house books I can get my hands on. Last week, I listened to an episode of my favorite nerdy podcast, History Extra. Adrian Tinniswood was the guest. First, what a name! Adrian Tinniswood. Also, he’s a professor at the University of Buckingham, where he runs a program for postgraduate degrees in Country House Studies. The master’s course is called ‘From Hampton Court to Downton Abbey.’

Melissa: Tinniswood is the author of 18 books on social history and architecture. His latest is the third in a trilogy of books that explore country house life during different eras. The new one is about from pre-WWI. It’s called ‘The Power and The Glory: Life in the English Country House Before the Great War.’

Melissa: This book delves into the history and customs of the British country house between 1870 and 1914 — so the end of the Victorian era. He covers all aspects of life, including hunting parties, servants, the gardens, and the impact of modern conveniences like cars and electricity. He’s an engaging storyteller, and he drops outrageous facts into his stories. For example: During this era, it wasn’t unusual at a big house for the staff to wash, dry, and fold 1800 pieces of linen per week.

Melissa: In his interviews and his books, he is not afraid to get gossipy and tell tales about posh people’s shenanigans. He shares a fun story about a revered British architect. His names was Richard Norman Shaw, and he designed dozens of Victorian buildings, including schools, churches, townhouses, and country homes. He built the kind of manors that have names instead of addresses, like Cragside and Wispers.

Melissa: He was also the master of the hustle. According to legend, he would wear dress shirts with extra-long sleeves. If he found himself sitting next to a wealthy man at a dinner party, Shaw would pull his sleeve out and sketch a design right on his shirt cuff. By the time cigars and port were done, he’d have convinced his acquaintance he needed a new manor house — and Shaw would have a commission for a new country pile.

Melissa: This book is a mix of solid history and delightful scuttlebutt. Famous people’s names are sprinkled in the pages. I also learned that there were two types of country house thieves. Dinner thieves struck while everyone was in the dining room. The thieves would use a ladder outside the manor to climb into the bedrooms and help themselves to jewelry and cash. The first-sleep thieves hit the house right after guests had gone to bed when everyone was sleeping at their soundest. [DAVE]

Melissa: If you want to know more about the world of ‘Downton Abbey’ and ‘Gosford Park,’ this book is a delicious way to learn it. It’s ‘The Power and The Glory: Life in the English Country House Before the Great War’ by Adrian Tinniswood. I’ll put the titles and links to his other country house books in the show notes.

David: Adam Ross is an author whose first novel was called Mr. Peanut. That came out in 2010. It was a notable book for the New York Times that year, and it was declared one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a few others.

David: Presumably for the last 15 years, he’s been working on his second novel. Ross has done public readings from this manuscript for the last decade. The book finally came out this month. It’s called ‘Playworld.’

David: I first became aware of it because Ron Charles of the Washington Post wrote a glowing review. Charles wrote, ‘starting 2025 with a novel this terrific gives me hope for the whole year.

David: I trust Ron. He’s an imaginary friend of mine. He and Bruce and Barak and I have a couple of imaginary beers from time to time. And if Ron says a book is great, I’m going to read a few pages.

David: I’m going to tell you the premise. If you’re like me, the premise will not necessarily grab you. It’s a coming-of-age story. The protagonist is a 14-year-old boy growing up in New York City. He’s a child actor in an artistic family. The whole book covers a year in his life.

David: Hm. Okay. I’m not against it. But I’m not like: GET OUT OF MY WAY.

David: Then I read this first paragraph:

In the fall of 1980, when I was fourteen, a friend of my parents named Naomi Shah fell in love with me. She was thirty-six, a mother of two, and married to a wealthy man. Like so many things that happened to me that year, it didn’t seem strange at the time.

David: And in the next paragraph, he says that, two decades later, he told his mom about that relationship, and his mom’s response was, “But she was such an ugly woman.”

David: Now I was 15 in 1980. And I don’t know what 15 is like now. I suspect not overly awesome but I can speak to then. My own adolescence was spent bouncing back and forth between adults who had abdicated their responsibilities for raising children and adults who we would describe today as predatory. Back then they were just adults. It wasn’t just me. I went to school with a bunch of kids who were also in that situation. A surprising number. We had a support group. I hope it was a symptom of that particular time when the boomer generation was going through their ‘me’ decade, and divorce felt rampant. But it did feel normal. Because: of course it did. We were fifteen and nothing else had happened to us. This is what growing up is like.

David: And, you know, as I got older, I was like: waiiit a second. That was abuse. Okay. I get it now. I’m caught up.

David: There’s another aspect of that paragraph, which carries through the whole book. The narrator tells the story from an older age. The overall effect is that it feels like someone recounting their youth. He has since laid down his anger, and forgiven his transgressors. There’s hope in the book — in part because the narrator exists as an older, wiser person.

David: There’s a bit in the book where the main character is talking to his therapist. And the therapist says, ‘So maybe that’s what you’ve been put on the earth for. To come up with a language for your life.’ And it feels like this book is the ultimate conclusion of that exercise. Ross has written a language for his life. Or at least that part of it.

David: Now. If you weren’t an adolescent in the early 80s, is this book still worth reading? Absolutely. The writing is fantastic, particularly on the sentence level. The details Ross catches and how he writes about them are just top-tier storytelling. The characters ring true. This novel is about growing up with a strong sense of New York City, and the 80s. The author’s life closely parallels the main character’s, so there’s what feels like veracity. Like his main character, the author, Ross, was a child actor in New York City in the 80’s. I suspect this is an autobiography shaded just a bit into literary fiction. If you’re interested in any of that, you will enjoy this. But, if you’re GenX, or if you were under the roof of adults who were more self-involved than they should have been, this book will resonate. It just came out two weeks ago. It’s ‘Playworld’ by Adam Ross.

David: And now our Distraction of the Week.

Melissa: Here’s a fun fact: Most novels are about 90,000 words. That breaks down to around 360 pages or so, depending on the book’s design. I love a big old cinderblock of a book, so my preference is somewhere between 500 and 600 pages — I think of that as ‘Jane Eyre length.’ Long enough to spend plenty of time getting to know the characters, but not so long it’s intimidating.

Melissa: But, I’ve also read a few chonkers that completely changed my worldview on what the words ‘long book’ mean. In 2017, I read Neal Stephenson’s ‘Cryptonomicon.’ It’s about 930 pages. I have no idea what prompted me to pick it up. It’s a huge adventure tale that weaves in history, romance, action, Alan Turing, gold, greed, loyalty, Nazis. There’s a lot of action, but it also has compelling character development. I loved that book! But even more, it showed me that I could happily devour doorstopper books. Since then, I’ve read a bunch.

Melissa: I’m telling all of you this now because I’m 6% into another epic. It’s called ‘The Wheel of Fortune.’ It’s a family saga by Susan Howatch that came out in 1984. It tells the story of the Godwin family and their manor house in Wales from 1913 through the 1960s. Each section is narrated by a different character, and so far, it is a delight. Lots of gossiping and whether or not people are the right kind of people and jilted lovers. Plus, the manor house is called Oxmoon. [DAVE]

Melissa: Anyway. I thought I would share 8 tips for reading longer books, in case you want to tackle a cinderblock, too.

Melissa: Number one: Choose wisely. A doorstopper might make you think of classics like ‘Middlemarch’ or ‘Great Expectations.’ But there are tons of hefty novels with the plotting and pacing of shorter books. They’re kind of like a trilogy that’s been published in one volume instead of three separate books. ‘Cryptonomicon’ definitely felt like that.

Melissa: Number two: Set your expectations. As modern story consumers, we’re conditioned to expect stories to unfold at a predictable pace. Most TV dramas, sitcoms, movies, and books use the three-act structure [DAVE — that’s the setup, the confrontation, and the resolution. ] And you can kind of feel when each act should shift to the next. A longer novel stretches that out across more pages, so the timing is different. That means you have to adjust your expectations, slow down a bit, and kind of give yourself over to the way the story unfolds.

Melissa: I have a corollary to number two: When you start reading a longer novel, I recommend you give yourself time to really get into it during that first reading session. Maybe 50 pages or so. That gets you grounded in the world you’re going to be inhabiting for a while and helps you get invested in the story.

Melissa: Number three: Make a list of the characters. Because I read on the Kindle most of the time, I do this in the Notes app on my phone. As new characters are introduced, I make notes to help me remember who they are and the relationships between them. I also do a mental casting and assign celebrities or people I know to each character so I can visualize their faces. I would be so embarrassed if anyone saw my notes. There are typos and my own weird shorthand for how I describe the characters. But the act of making the notes has two advantages: Taking a pause to write a few words about them makes them stick in my mind better, and I have a reference if a character disappears from the narrative on page 274 and makes a surprise return on page 583.

Melissa: Number four: Try an e-reader. I read the Wolf Hall trilogy, Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Labyrinth of the Spirits, and Plain Bad Heroines on my Kindle. They’re all north of 500 pages each. When I saw those books on the shelves of a bookshop, I was, like, WHOA! They are massive. They’re heavy and a little unwieldy. An e-reader makes epics like that portable so you can take advantage of a few minutes of reading here and there. Plus, I think it’s less intimidating to not have the reminder of the 4-inch thick physical book. [DAVE]

Melissa: Number five: Mix in other reading. For me, the great gift of a very long book is that I get to spend a lot of time in a particular world with a group of characters I get to know very well. But if you’re a person who craves variety, you might want to break it up a little bit. You could read a short story in between chapters of your long book, alternate chapters of the novel a nonfiction title, or have a completely different type of audiobook going at the same time.

Melissa: So, those are my tips for tackling whopper novels. I’ve put a list of some of my favorites in the show notes, in case you want to take on a nice long story.

Melissa: Visit strongsenseofplace.com/library for more on all the books we talked about today.

David: Thanks for joining us on the library of last time. Remember to visit your local library and your independent bookstore to lose some time yourself.

Melissa: Stay curious. We’ll talk to you soon.

[cheerful music]