'Oh, I don't know how it grew to be so long,' said Amit. 'I'm very undisciplined. But I too hate long books: the better, the worse. If they're bad, they merely make me pant with the effort of holding them up for a few minutes. But if they're good, I turn into a social moron for days, refusing to go out of my room, scowling and growling at interruptions, ignoring weddings and funerals, and making enemies out of friends. I still bear the scars of Middlemarch.'

--from A Suitable Boy

Saturday, July 24, 1999
A Suitable Schedule

As usual, not much happened on Saturday. Combined with the fact that this entry is well over a week late, this once again begs the question of whether I really ought to be shooting for daily updates, or if I should just pack it in and resign myself to updating less frequently.

Two things are fairly certain, I figure:

  1. If I weren't trying to do daily updates, I wouldn't be sliding into these giant backlogs as often. I tend to fall into these vicious cycles, in which I'm so far behind that I feel overwhelmed, so I don't update, so I get even further behind, and so on.

  2. If I weren't trying to do daily updates, I wouldn't be writing nearly as much. See, if I don't feel that I have to do something, with some sense of deadline pressure, more likely than not, I won't get to it. I have enough to take care of elsewhere. Part of my motivation in starting this journal was to force me to write every day, and when it works, it works.

In short, there's no easy answer, I fear.


As an aside, I know that the reference books all claim that the proper term is "vicious circle." But I have never heard anybody talk about a "vicious circle"; it's always been a "cycle" in my experience. Perhaps it's a regionalism; I don't know. At any rate, I have always used "vicious cycle" myself, and I refuse to change my ways simply because some book dictates otherwise. So there.

(Do I contradict myself? I do not care.)


I spent much of Shabbos finally returning to A Suitable Boy, by Vikram Seth. Reputedly the second-longest novel ever written in English, I originally read this the summer it hit the market, in 1993. I then bought my own copy of it via eBay over a year ago. I started rereading it sometime between then and now, and stopped about halfway through. I finally took it up again just now.

You've just gotta love a guy who writes his first novel in sonnet form, and follows it up with a sprawling 1349-page epic. Especially one who writes as well as he does.

In short, I like his characters, I like the story he weaves, and I even like the type, which was set in India at his insistance. Somewhat to my surprise, I even liked -- or at least didn't mind -- all the stuff about Indian politics this time around, much of which I skimmed the first time through. About the only part that completely lost me was the cricket matches toward the end, but that wasn't really his fault; one could hardly expect him to interrupt the narrative to explain the rules of the game, after all.

In short, it's a good book. But a long one.

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