Where some people watch cat videos to escape the day-to-day of life, I watch architecture and design videos. In the same vein, I also listen to the 99% Invisible podcast and that is what led me to pick up the 1974 book The Power Broker by Robert Caro, his Pulitzer-Prize-winning biography of Robert Moses.
Well, “pick up” is not quite accurate—“hoist” would be a better verb. The book is 311,500 words corralled into 1,200 pages. I cannot actually hold it up so to read it, I put a cushion on my lap and rest the book on the cushion. Apparently, Caro’s original manuscript exceeded one-million words (perhaps not surprising given the 522 interviews and 7 years of research he put into it), so I suppose these inconveniences could have been much worse … like, 4 times worse.
Caro wrote the book just before I was born. It was a different time. Brains were not yet trained by the internet and social media gather information in short bits and bytes. I can vaguely recall a time when I would spend long hours at a stretch reading long things without interruption, like theory and philosophy. I’ve lost that ability sometime in the last 20 years. It’s not that I read bad stuff, but I do read much more short-form work—poetry, internet memes, popular writing. And I’m realizing that even the longer books I read are written differently now.
Caro’s writing is excellent and the story is captivatingly built and told. But his sentences are long, with most comprising several clauses and relying on semicolons, em-dashes (and parenthetical asides). It requires sustained presence to comprehend written information when the sentence structures are complex, and I’m disappointed to witness this erosion in my mental abilities.
So now I’m reading the book not only to be part of 99pi’s year-long conversation about the book, but also to retrain my brain for long-form reading and complex comprehension. Last night, I read the third chapter and was pleased to do so without once stopping for no reason to check how many pages were left. Am I imagining the feeling of neural pathways stretching themselves longer each day?
It’s glorious to lose track of time not only in a book but in a single sentence or paragraph. Some things are going to need to change—I think my morning word-games will be the first sacrifices to free up the time and neurons I will need to recapture the act of reading as a meditation rather than a consumerist event.
What’s going with your neurons?
Tell me a change you’ve noticed in your brain and whether or not you want to do anything about it…
This book looks like an impressive feat to read. Sometimes I have to set a timer for about 20 minutes so that I can put a dent in any book that I'm reading. As if it's similar to doing any other work even though I feel guilty about having to do it this way.