How to Read a Long, Complicated Novel Very Quickly

A personal guide to reading The Brothers Karamazov in a month and other resources to help you read a substantial classic in a short time

Hello. I am so glad you are here. I will leave some personal news at the bottom of the post.

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There are many reasons why someone would want to read a long and difficult book in a short amount of time.

Ted Gioia

recently published about his ambitious lifetime reading plan. He claims to read slowly but I frankly think he undersells himself. (I speak as someone who took thirty years to get through a particular Tolstoy novel. Now that’s slowly!) In order for us mere mortals to catch up to Ted at this point we will have to get fairly aggressive with our reading timelines.

My Lifetime Reading Plan

However, you may have an externally imposed deadline placed on your reading, like… oh, I dunno… maybe a weeklong mountain retreat in North Carolina where you are expected to have rich and intellectually complex discussions about Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov.

I have heard that some people may be behind in their reading, and if that’s the case I wanted to share some tips and tools that have worked for me when I have found myself in situations where I have had to do a close reading in a limited amount of time.

Me reading Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited during the 2022 Close Reads Retreat in Blowing Rock, NC. (Photo courtesy of Graeme Pitman.)

Before we start I want to make sure you know that I do not consider this an ideal way of jumping into a book. However, I like to think of books the way I think of people. You enter into a special relationship when you read and sometimes the circumstances that bring you together are less than ideal. That does not mean that you still can’t have a meaningful and deep relationship with a work of literature.

Scanning the text

When I have more time, I like Andrea Lipinski and Andrew Kern’s CIRCE Guide to Reading (PDF table of contents and sample here). I generally use their system of colors to note new characters and places (pink), changes in settings or time (green), important scenes that generate questions (yellow), beautiful passages (blue), and new terms (orange). 

However, when I am trying to blitz through a large book I do two fingertip scans to get the lay of the land and then I just use the pink pencil to note new characters and places.

Breaking the work into sections

Using information from the scan, I divide the novel into four sections (if I only have a month) so I know where I am supposed to be after each week.

Sometimes I try reading with someone who wants or needs to read the same book. I know people who schedule a regular check in with others to make sure goals are reached. Reading with others can make the time more enjoyable

Writing notes and marginalia

Some of you may have shuddered at the thought of marking up a book. That is okay. For library books I have been known to use colored sticky notes and flags. 

Look at all those sticky flags for my recent reading of Eudora Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter.

I also use DSri Seah’s Fast Book Outliner (FBO) which helps me keep track of where I encounter main events and themes in a novel.

For a particularly dense and detailed book I like to use Seah’s 100-page FBO to write micro summaries of what happened on each page.

Notes from my Lenten reading of Eugene Vodolazkin’s Laurus.

For marginalia

David Kern

of

Goldberry Studios

has his own system for marking up books that (unlike his father's system) only requires a writing instrument of one color.

Do You Have a System for Marginalia?

Finding guides

There are plenty of resources for well-known classics. I find Sparknotes and other online guides helpful. This 30-page PDF has worksheets.

Brandon Monk wrote a great article that gives a birdseye view of the novel. He mentions an excellent biography of Dostoyevsky by Joseph Frank which I, too, endorse. It is over 900 pages but you can just read the chapters that have to do with the novel. I found them to be very informative.

I also recommend this great YouTube playlist by

Jessica Hooten Wilson

which features a series of videos that are not that long—roughly 10-15 minutes each.

These guides should help you sketch out the themes and main characters and events so you know when you ought to be paying more attention when you encounter them in the story. (I am looking at you, Grand Inquisitor!)

Listening to the book

If time is really short, consider listening to the audiobook at the fastest speed you can tolerate. One of my friends listens to books at 3x the speed. I can’t do that. I just giggle uncontrollably because it sounds ridiculous. I listen at 1.75x speed at most. Most audiobooks have clear chapter breaks which is very helpful.

You can use the divide and conquer approach and read what you can and listen to the chapters while you do something else. Just alternate back and forth just so you can get through the book as quickly as you can.

And now, most importantly….

Enjoying the ride

When you are reading a book extremely fast, you can fall into the trap of trying to torture a great work into telling you its truths. Don’t let that happen. 

Think about this reading like being invited to meet someone famous and important for a short visit. Ask the questions you most want to ask. Enjoy the charisma of whom you are visiting, and let them be their best and most gracious self. Let them teach you whatever they know, and know that the door is always open for a longer visit at a later time. 

As Andrew Kern wrote in the beginning of his guide: 

Don’t wring truths out of [books] they don’t want to tell you. 
Don’t demand everything in a moment and don’t force them to be efficient. 
Don’t throw them away when they don’t do things your way. 
Enjoy them for what they draw out of you, reveal about you to yourself, and help you see in others. 
Let them change you because you love them. 
Read them humbly and don’t try too hard to tell them what they mean. 

This warning reminds me of Billy Collins’s “Introduction to Poetry” where the speaker wants his students to enjoy learning what a poem has to offer,

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it. 

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Love the parts of the work that you read. Even if you have to skip around. Don’t worry if you can’t get through the whole book in a month. Life happens, and reading what you can is better than not reading at all. 

If you are going to Blowing Rock in June I  can’t wait to ask you in person if any of this was helpful. 

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And finally, a personal thanks to my paid subscribers. Last month I registered for my first class. However, we just got our minivan from the shop. Since September we have paid $10,000 in repairs! So truly… I would have been panicking about the MFA if I didn’t have your support.

And this Dostoyevsky retreat will be my last one for a long time since I will be joining the ranks of “poor grad students” in the fall.

If you are on the fence about being a paid subscriber it would be lovely if you considered it, but it would also be great if you like, share, or comment just so I know you are out there. I can always do with that type of encouragement.