…is one hell of a way to spend a day. Recently I’ve been reading through some weighty stuff, and I needed
a break. The Polysyllabic Spree came shipped used from an Amazon seller and I started in on it at about 3 or so this afternoon and just ploughed through all fifteen or so essays in basically a day-long sitting. Time spent with Hornby is always time well spent, always very funny and at times shockingly insightful. He’s sort of a modern-day Wodehouse, at least when it comes to downright pithiness. Polysyllabic is the first collection of his columns in the Believer, on his (hillarious) book-buying and -reading habits.
In other reading news, John Gardner and I are in a prize fight (to use one of Hornby’s metaphors) over The 
Sunlight Dialogues. I’ve got a hardback version of the first edition (seventh printing), and it is a very, very large book – clocking it at 660 of the literally largest and word-filled pages you could ever ask for. (I saw a paperback of the book and it was at 1000 pages – and in tiny print!) I read thirty pages in a day and I feel as if I have landed a knockout punch, but after that I’m so worn out I can’t muster a single page for three days. He comes with a right hook – the densest, most complex prose a thinking person could ever ask for. However, I’m convinced that I’m going to be positively jubilant after I’ve climbed this mountain of American literature – I already feel as if my mind has been hit with an atom bomb.
And besides, who wouldn’t like a novelist who played the banjo?
Among other things, I’m reading the Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath, which are excellent (especially the latter poems, right before she committed suicide in ‘63) as well as a biography of her marriage with her poet-husband, Ted Hughes, aptly titled, Her Husband, by Diane Middlebrook.
