Around this time of year I often find myself totally immersed in whatever it is I'm reading. In the fall of 2021 I took a class on Ulysses, permanently altering my brain chemistry. The next year it was Infinite Jest, whose 1000+ pages I managed to read in under 2 months. Last year there wasn't one Big Important Book I was reading. Actually I was in a bit of a rut reading-wise. That mindset of immersion though...I think it was there even then in a subtler way. I remember reading Casey Plett's story collection, A Safe Girl to Love, and feeling as I carried it around with me that it was like my companion. I felt similarly during my yearly Catcher in the Rye re-read.
I suppose 2023's Big Important Book was Bolaño's 2666. Certainly I felt lost in that, though it breaks the pattern in a few ways. I read it over the course of the summer, and the feeling of "lostness" wasn't pleasent in the way of Joyce and DFW. It was another labyrinth, yes, but one I wanted desperately to leave. Get me out of this hell! If I have to read about another female corpse showing signs of being anally and vaginally raped I am going to tear you in half! Its last section, the Part About Archimboldi, was maybe more in line. I found characters there, I felt unalone. And in Bolaño's recursive fashion the character of Hans Reiter himself felt lost and unalone in the journal of a stranger.
I want to get lost in something again, something long and exhaustive, but perhaps not sprawling. Joyce's Dublin and DFW's tennis academy and half way house felt exploded up to the size of universes for their detail.
I felt pretty immersed in Cloud Atlas last month, I guess, but it wasn't terribly long. And Dempow Torishima's Sisyphean is demanding in a way that maybe gets me to feel that way, too...again not too long. Sub 500 pages, for god's sake. Two books I hope to read before the year is out are Dhalgren and Wuthering Heights. What about Middlemarch? Moby Dick? Gravity's Rainbow?
My roommate's father tried to get her to read Gravity's Rainbow as a teenager. She never finished it. Upon hearing that I viscerally felt just how different our upbringings must have been.
Perhaps what I really need to do is get lost in my own writing, The Orgy. Think I read once about DFW getting so lost writing in Infinite Jest that he felt he wasn't part of the real world. That's the kind of shit I need to be on!!!!