Charles Petzold’s Light Summer Reading
When Windows programming legend Charles Petzold told me last week that he was going on vacation, I assumed he was off on a summer trip - perhaps the beach, or a nice resort. “No, I’m taking some time off to read,” he replied.
I assumed it was a much needed break from writing to take in a few of the recently published bestsellers, or maybe to do some research for an upcoming book project. I was wrong.
Mr. Petzold is taking a week off to consume the more than 1,500 pages that is Clarissa - one of the longest novels in the English language which was originally published in 7 volumes between 1747 and 1748.
I am going to read Clarissa in seven consecutive days. I will begin on the morning of Sunday, July 15, 2007 and (if all goes well) finish sometime in the late afternoon or early evening of Saturday, July 21.
That’s 11-12 hours per day!
Clarissa has no chapters. It is an epistolary novel—a novel composed entirely of letters (epistles)—and there are over 500 of them written during one calendar year. The first letter (to the title character from her best friend, Anna Howe) begins:
I am extremely concerned, my dearest friend, for the disturbances that have happened in your family. I know how it must hurt you to become the subject of the public talk; and yet upon an occasion so generally known it is impossible but that whatever relates to a young lady, whose distinguished merits have made her the public care, should engage everybody’s attention. I long to have the particulars from yourself, and of the usage I am told you receive upon an accident you could not help and in which, as far as I can learn, the sufferer was the aggressor.
Good luck Charles. You are a brave man.
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