What To Read Instead #1 -- Garbo

Starting a new blog series today, dedicated to this concept: letting go of books that might use up more of the time on your life clock than would really be a good investment. With literally millions of books in this world of ours, why not choose the ones that you'll truly enjoy, or always remember, or learn from, or be inspired by? 

We begin this post, as all future posts will begin, with a suggestion for a book to skip. 

I'm starting this first post int he series with a book which was the gold standard for have-to-read when I was young. If a person on the street was asked, back in the day, to name a famous literary work, the answer would often have been Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. 

Reasons to skip:

It's too long. At nearly 600,000 words, it would take every minute (no lunch breaks) of a 40-hour work week to get from the first page to the last. 

Unless you are a whiz with Russian names, you are going to get Bolkonsky mixed up with Drubetskoy, you know you are. And characters not only have very long names, but they have diminutive versions of their names -- and nicknames too. You'd need to make a chart.

Though War and Peace was written (and re-written) in the middle of the 19th century, it's set decades earlier, in the time when Napoleon was taking over Europe, and he had his eye on Russia. European history is complex anyway, but the Napoleonic era is particularly hard to keep track of, because it wasn't really a matter of one country against another, but one guy against everybody. 

You want European history?  How about A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens? You only need to have a rough idea of the French Revolution to start the book, and you'll learn what you need to know as you read. 

It'll still take the average reader nine hours to read this, so it's not like you're swapping out a literary masterwork for a Harlequin romance. Most important: is the time spent reading A Tale of Two Cities worth deducting from your allotted time on Earth? Yes it is. 

Next week: Another book to skip and another book to read instead.

Disclaimer:  In this series I do suggest skipping books, but there's always a substitute offering in these posts. I never suggest skipping a book and playing more video games or spending more time doomscrolling. And I am not banning, condemning, harming, or trashing the books I recommend skipping. There's nothing wrong with the titles I suggest skipping; it's just a matter of making choices with limited time to read in a busy, busy world. 

Garbo