Journal — reading the cultural index
Collections pathway
Slow reading.
A pathway and a posture
Six works that ask for one season each — books one reads in fragments.
An ongoing pathway. New steps added as the room reads.
There is a kind of reading that modern publishing has decided is a defect: returning to a book for months, a few pages at a time, in the small hour after dinner. The slow reading pathway was built for that kind of reader.
The route begins with The Magic Mountain — Mann's refusal to solve the resumption problem — and expands from there. Walk it at the speed it wants to be walked, which is considerably slower than you think.
A slow novel is not a book one reads slowly. It is a book one reads at the right size.
The route, in order.
- Novel · 1924The Magic Mountain
The anchor. Twelve pages a night, between November and August.