Blog 24 Choosing My Reading in the Interest of Time

I’ve mentioned in previous pieces about what I view as age-related changes in my reading. Though my interests remain broad, the sense of time left has narrowed my selectivity. I’ve also mentioned that several times each year, I will choose to read a literary work. Several more times, I will stumble upon a literary work without realizing it until I’m embedded in the story.

My unspecified limit is applied due to the time and concentrative energy often required to absorb the density of some literary efforts. At times, it can be a slog, leaving me questioning my own intelligence. At the same time, it has to do with what I suspect is impatience on my part. I want the story to flow, want to flow along with it, especially if it’s a long book. If the writing requires me to stop periodically to review what I’ve just read, sometimes to back up to be certain who the character is that’s speaking or what the point of the writer was, I may not make it to the end.

Whatever duty I might feel toward the writer, it is increasingly eclipsed by a sense of duty to myself. I believe it goes something like this: I’ve been granted life, one life. Within it, I’ve been also granted this gift of having access to endless stories. My duty to myself is to not squander time in some joyless exercise as I near the end of the gift of life. And so, I try not to.

As an example, I’m currently reading,
Agaat, “hailed as an international masterpiece,” written by the award-winning South African writer, Marlene van Niekerk. I’ve now trekked through more than one hundred pages of an almost six hundred page book. The story, thus far, is delivered through the eyes and mind of an aging white woman almost completely incapacitated by a neuromuscular disease. The story itself is the endless war of wills between the afflicted woman and her black caretaker, Agaat. Rescued from apparent abandonment as a toddler, Agaat is raised by Milla de Wet to serve. Little more than a slave all her life under apartheid, Agaat perseveres, the table turning when ALS renders Milla entirely dependent upon her servant. It’s a story of mental cruelty and subtle revenge. Overarching the more humble yet gritty story of the two main characters is the dark stain on white South Africa of apartheid that has damaged all South Africans. Sound familiar?

My struggle is with the pacing and delivery. So much of it moves in real time, crawling forwards or backwards at the snail’s pace of Milla’s thoughts and memories. To salvage my desire to pay the writer homage by finishing her opus, I speed read passages to move at a pace I can tolerate. Currently, this is my self-imposed dilemma.

Crazy? Put the book down? I should. I could. I won’t.