Philip Roth once said, "To read a novel requires a certain amount of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel, really."
Certainly not all of us have the time, mental bandwidth, mental health, or the reading/language skills to finish a novel within two weeks. However, in fairness to Roth, he is speaking to the lack of devotion to the art of reading rather than one's mental or situational ability to read. If it takes you over two weeks to finish a novel because you were reading bits and pieces of it in between watching movies, shows, social media, etc, did you even really read it?
On first pass, my thought was that Roth sounds pretentious as hell. I thought he sounded like an author annoyed that he doesn't have his audiences' full attention. Ironically, one of the few average length novel that took me more than two weeks to finish was his Pulitzer winning novel American Pastoral, and judging by how many reviews referenced this quote and made the joke "Well, according to Roth, I didn't really read this novel because it took me more than two weeks to finish, so take my review with a grain of salt!" a lot of people slogged through it. Maybe he's just a salty author.
But, after thinking about it, maybe he has a point. He didn't say that reading a novel requires your full "concentration, focus, [and] devotion to reading", he said that it requires "a certain amount". It's fair to say that anything worth doing is worth doing well. The two week time frame seems arbitrary but, I get what he's saying. If it's taking you forever to finish a novel because you're binge watching tv shows in between chapters, are you fully able to connect the dots and appreciate what the author is trying to do? As someone who reads multiple books and once, I would argue that yes, someone could still follow the plot and appreciate the author's intentions while watching an entire show series in between, but I get the point he's trying to make.
Do you agree with Roth? Does ignoring the two weeks requirement make a difference? If it takes someone too long to read a book because they were engaging with other media while reading the book, did they "really" read the book?
by Anxious-Fun8829
46 Comments
Putting a time constraint on these matters has never made sense to me. Just read the book, who cares about your quasi definition of “reading”?
You are creating a false comparison here. Reading fast vs slow and focused vs unfocused are separate variables. Reading slow does not mean you are unfocused and not analyzing the book. Reading quickly does not mean you are some kind of analytical savant. Reading speed and how well you absorb and digest a book are not directly correlated.
hard disagree
I stopped reading at Philip Roth (just kidding, read half of the quote). Seriously, can’t stand that dude.
Tagging my review for “Portnoy’s Complaint” for good measures.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4569651169
I totally hear what you’re saying. . .but my first thought when I finished reading your post is. . .who cares?
If you are taking more than 2 weeks to read novels are you going to read his quote and think to yourself “damn, I need to step it up, I didn’t really read that”?
People read for lots of different reasons and in different circumstances, I don’t think you should worry about what some guy thinks real reading is.
For what it’s worth, my main form of reading of novels these days is to my now 2 year old daughters, I have almost since they came home from the hospital. We are in the last 60 pages of Anna Karenina, it’s taken probably 6 months at this point. I hadn’t read it since I was a child and I have thoroughly enjoyed it. Does it matter that it’s been more than 2 weeks?
Not trying to be a jerk,to you or the guy you are quoting, I just don’t quite understand why anyone should care.
I think Phil should mind his own buisness
… No.
I read one book at a time. I am also an incredibly slow reader. It takes me about a month to finish a book. A normal sized book. Longer books take me months.
To me, the guy sounds pretentious is all fuck.
When I read, yes, I agreed that I need to be distraction free. That means no TV and music at a low volume or not at all. But you should be able to take a little break after a chapter or something and do other tasks in between. Sure, maybe if you set it down for a month and then pick it back up again you might have trouble with it, but this dedicating your whole entire self to a book is crazy. People have busy lives and you are lucky if they decide to pick up your book.
This sounds like some kind of book reading elitist thing.
I’ll read as I read, not as someone else thinks I should, even a famous author. Reading is what’s important, not speed. So, Roth may, in his judgement, be right, but not in mine.
Ah so reading a novel is a class privilege? Thanks. I guess I don’t read anymore.
Sounds like pretentious malarkey to me. Some books are just going to take longer than others to read. That’s why we categorize them by their pacing.
If there was, you know, an actual scientific study I might be more inclined to believe it but it’s just some arbitrary made up figure.
I’ve been reading the same book (The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguru) for almost a month now, and that’s because it’s a slow paced, complicated novel that almost by design feels like it was intended to take more than 2 weeks for you to take in everything.
I somewhat agree in the sense that there is a barrier, albeit ambiguous, between engaged reading and passive reading. In a similar vein there are readers who boast exorbitantly high yearly totals for books read, but can rarely, if ever recall or critique aspects of any but the most recent book. I personally find it more rewarding on virtually every level to read as engaged as possible, but we’re kidding ourselves if we think someone can’t be engaged and also finish a work in over two weeks. I don’t find it to be that mutually exclusive (depending on the specific work).
Yeah, those are not the words of a man who does his fair share of the housework. Some of that is down to when and where he lived but he doesn’t sound like someone who was scraping for time to enjoy reading as a hobby.
I disagree with this in principle (and you just can’t generalize something like this) but honestly for me, it’s true in practice. I don’t have the memory/attention span to remember part 1 of a book I read more than a week ago, so if i did read something over that long, I most likely *didn’t* get the full experience of it. But that’s just me.
If it takes me longer than 2 weeks it’s likely I’ll lose interest and finishing becomes a chore rather than a pleasure. That’s the opposite of reading it
Reading elitism. There’s something new. I’ll bet he hates audiobooks!!! Hah
I won’t deny there is a level of engagement that adds to reading a novel, but as others have said you need to have the free time. And some books are just dense–it took me a few months to get through *Romance of the Three Kingdoms*.
Also too fast is a risk too–I used to go too fast and miss stuff.
I acknowledge this makes me pretentious, but I actually have the opposite criticism. If you read 150+ books a year did you really read any of them? I’m over the fast fashion approach to reading.
I think book culture encourages it [reading challenges, setting numerical goals, all the nutty tracking (here’s the books I read color coded by genre/length/where I found the book/what I wore when reading it!) etc.]
I think authors write to it by writing books that are fast and easy to read instead of focusing on really great writing and character development.
I think BookTok reviews express it. Anytime I hear someone say something like ‘this book was a slog’ I wonder if it’s really a slog (and some are) or if it just wasn’t plot heavy enough to help them read it FAST.
Gravity’s Rainbow took me a month, Infinite Jest took me three weeks…
Idk, I *like* to read 2-3 books a month, but sometimes it doesn’t work out. Idk who cares? I like Roth’s books though.
How fast or slow you read does not matter. If you like the book and understand it than that’s all you need.
It took me a lot more than two weeks to read “The Neverending Story”, although to be fair I was reading it in German, which I’m learning.
It was slow because a) I had to look up words and sentences and b) I too time out to read in English at times when it was all getting a bit much.
But then I often stop reading one book if I’m finding it a bit heavy going, then I read another, and then go back to the first. Or keep swapping between two. Sometimes one is in German and the other in English, sometimes they are both in English.
It works for me. If someone I don’t care about tells me I’m not “reading it really” then I’ll just shrug and move on.
I agree with this, for myself, when strictly looking at comprehension.
If I take longer than 2 weeks to finish a book, I probably didn’t enjoy it.
That said, I should DNF more than I do.
I have a 5-year old and a job. If I read a book in under two weeks, it’s because it’s a very short book. Took me 11 months to read the Dark Tower series (+Salems Lot) and I was moving pretty quickly for the available time (and energy) that I had. Put a time limit on reading seems silly and arbitrary to me.
This makes no sense to me. I read Les Mis over the course of a year, and Infinite Jest over a summer. I was reading other things as well during that time. Those are great reading experiences to look back on and I feel like having more time to soak in the books made it a more special experience.
I mean, there comes the point where you pick up the book so rarely that you have a hard time remembering what happened. At that point, you might as well stop. But it feels silly to out a set time frame on it.
The thing to remember is that Roth was a writer and reading a book for enjoyment and reading it with your writer head on are not the same thing.
That said, the longer the time it takes me to read something l, the more likely I am to have forgotten stuff that happened earlier in it
I sure hope it took them more than two weeks to write it. A 2 week novel is probably the quality level of Fifty Shades of Grey.
Wait. In order to be a “real” reader it has to take me less than two weeks to finish a novel? That’s not only a totally random and arbitrary number, it also makes me wonder if this guy really thinks that Dostojewski is the same as a book from the summer romance section. I mean in terms of time you need to read and understand the text.
Also, I just don’t understand the idea behind that quote. It’s not like everything you’ve already read gets deleted from your memory if you put down a book for a couple of days. You can fully concentrate on reading a book while you’re reading it and still have a life outside of reading that book …
If I read a chapter a day and said book has more then 14 chapters then that’s how long it’ll take me to read it, I didn’t enjoy it or whatever less due to me relaxing and taking my time to read it.
*More* than two weeks? I’ve heard the opposite argument (that reading too fast apparently ruins it as you’ve not savouring or whatnot), but certainly not this one. Anyway, one of my all-time favourites that had a profound effect on my personality took me a year. When I adore something, I like to linger in it.
I think this is a really ignorant take and would turn people off from reading. Not everybody has the time, the energy, the reading ability, etc, to finish novels in less than two weeks. I don’t think we should discourage people from reading because they might be slower readers. If a busy parent who works full time and also takes care of their family can finish a novel a month, I think that’s awesome and I certainly would not tell them that they didn’t actually read the novel.
I don’t agree. All books are different.
You were right with your first assumption of him being pretentious.
I read everything very slowly. I don’t binge tv episodes between chapters but I do bounce between books (and FanFiction) quite often. It takes me a month to read a fairly short book sometimes.
I know I have attention issues so I do take that into account. I reread chapters all the time because I felt like I didn’t give it enough attention the first time. I go slow, and I try to make sure that I have enough time to read uninterrupted. Sometimes that means I only read a chapter or two a week. I usually read more but my “serious” book gets the focused attention while fanfic and other things are just mild distractions. Even with fanfic I’ll skim a chapter and then put it down to read fully later. Everything takes ages to get through but I usually remember what I read so that’s good I guess.
I don’t think I‘ve finished very many books in under two weeks. If I’m traveling I can read more. Reading on a train was very enjoyable.
Sounds like Philip Roth is a pretentious idiot. Same goes for anyone who thinks he was right. And for the record; it doesn’t take me that long to read a novel. I can finish the entire WoT series in a month.
Strangest gatekeeping I’ve ever heard. I have about an hour a day to read, so if it takes a month to get through a chunky fantasy novel, so be it.
Two weeks is a super arbitrary time frame, and on that alone I call BS. Considering all the different types of books and all the different types of readers, the very fact that he plopped down a random end point indicates he’s speaking pure opinion based on his own personal limitations. It’s absolute folly to imagine that this would apply to everyone.
mmm.. I’ve been following fanfics for years with no problem so… i would say false on this, also chinese webnovels are several bibles long, one took me 3 months to read, also not a problem, so it depends on the material and your own pace, but than being said, I have no problem pausing reading and picking it up later, I do however have problems when I read too fast and can’t remember what I read, but it doesn’t happen often and it’s usually when I’m bored with what I’m reading.
Funny, I didn’t think it was quantity of time that mattered, just the quality of it. So because I read War and Peace in three weeks, I didn’t actually read it? That is not only pretentious as hell, it’s also kind of elitist. Everyone reads in their own way and frankly, I don’t feel it’s anyone’s business what I read, the circumstances under which I read, or how long it takes me. Be grateful that I am reading your book, period.
This is probably why I don’t read Roth. This attitude would just piss me off and make his books a DNF.
that dude needs to stop sniffing his own farts.
Yes, if I spent a month reading a novel because there’s more to my life than reading a novel, I still did, in fact, read the novel.
Thus Roth fellow sounds like he’s kinda an idiot
I would rank this position below Patches O’Houilan’s Wrench-Dodgeball theory.
Inflammatory post and not a single response from OP in an hour. This is just bait, y’all.
never heard of him. at this point i tend to ignore toxic people. you should do the same.
Hard disagree, sometimes when the stars align I end up reading instead of sleeping and books kind of just vanish