How to Read a Long Novel Without Losing the Thread

A long novel is not a harder book than a short one. It is the same difficulty carried further, and the thing that defeats most readers is not a sentence they cannot parse but a fortnight between chapter nine and chapter ten. Return after that gap and half the cast has gone dim; the book is now work, and work loses to almost everything else.

So the whole practical question is continuity. Everything below is in service of that one thing.

Read in runs, not in minutes

Twenty minutes a night is enough to keep a book open for a year and finish nothing. Three hours on a Sunday will carry you through a quarter of most novels and leave the cast standing in your head all week. If you can only have short sessions, make at least one long one a week and let the short ones live off it.

Novels of this period were largely read that way to begin with. A great many appeared in monthly parts, written for readers picking them up after weeks away, which is why so much of the nineteenth century reminds you who everyone is as it goes. These books are more forgiving than their length suggests.

Keep a cast list for the first hundred pages

Not notes. A list: name, one phrase, and who they are attached to. Chancery clerk, in love with the ward. Aunt, holds the money. Confusion in a long novel is almost never about plot; it is about which of four similarly named men owns the mill. Ten lines on the inside cover buys you the rest of the book.

After the first hundred pages you will not need it. The names have become people by then, and people are easy to remember.

Skimming is allowed

There will be a chapter on the history of a monastery, or eleven pages of a parliamentary election. You are permitted to read those quickly. A novelist paid by the instalment is not a novelist writing every page for you, and refusing to move fast through a slow patch is how readers stop at page two hundred and blame themselves.

The exception is the opening. Whatever you skim later, read the first fifty pages properly: that is where the debts are contracted that the rest of the book pays off.

When you have lost the thread

Do not start again. Almost nobody who begins a long novel a second time finishes it either. Go back one chapter, not to the beginning, read it at speed, and carry on. If it is truly gone, read a summary of what you have already read — not of what is coming — and continue. Spoiling yourself on the past costs nothing.

One long book at a time

Two short books at once is a pleasant habit. Two long ones is two abandoned books. The whole point of length is accumulation, and accumulation does not survive being interleaved with something else that is also accumulating.

Choose the right one to start with

If you are coming back to novels after some years away, begin with one that moves. Wuthering Heights is not a gentle book but it is a fast one, and nobody in it can be put down. The Picture of Dorian Gray spends its epigrams early and its plot late, which is an easy way round. A structurally patient novel — one that opens in a fog and a court of law — rewards you enormously, but reward it later.

None of this makes a difficult book easy. It makes a long book continuous, which is the only thing that ever stood between most readers and the end of it.