Epic (Fail)

Well, now that 2022 is coming to end, I must confess a failure. I failed to adhere to my New Years Resolution of 357 days ago.

A year ago I promised myself I would not read any more epic books, be they novels or works of nonfiction. I’d only read books of 180 pages or less (about 150,000 words maximum).

Instead, here’s what I read, in chronological order:

 

World War II at Sea – 650 pages

War and Peace – 1,392 pages

With the Old Breed – 344 pages

The Matarese Circle – 611 pages

Ivanhoe – 497 pages

Four Days in November – 512 pages

The Pillars of the Earth – 980 pages

Abraham Lincoln: The War Years – 443

Martin Chuzzlewit – 837 pages

 

That’s nine books for a total of 6,266 pages. That’s an average of nearly 700 pages a book!

Had I kept my resolution, those 6,266 pages would have encompassed nearly 35 books.

Yes, I scratched off some items of my bucket list. Yes, I learned a lot about a wide variety of fields. Yes, I sampled some literary genres in which I rarely partake.

But a lot of them dragged, to be honest.

Now, I want to write my third manuscript in 2023. I did read four SF paperbacks this past year, all in summer, but since my novel will be SF-based, I feel like I wanna put away two or three dozen SF paperbacks immediately to get back into the swing of the sci fi thing. And, as we all know, the perfect science fiction paperback clocks in at exactly 180 pages.

I had been noodling with dipping the toes in Plato January 1st. And that might happen sometime in 2023. But I’m kinda burned out on the Epic. The Republic is 400 tightly packed pages, two columns per page in my Great Books edition. I want to read a story that will grip me on a Sunday and come to a satisfying conclusion that Saturday.

So on January 1st I’m going to crack open the SF paperback that’s been longest in the On Deck circle and enjoy some mind-bending adventures in the future.

And stay Epic-free, at least until the Spring.