Reading, Writing & the Music of Books

How much time does a book take?

May 29, 2024

Django Reinhardt’s lick in Blues en Mineur haunts me. As the band introduces the grounding G minor chords, he flirts with the key with a casual F# enclosure, wherein a leading A is assuredly drawn back to the minor root. Then the band jumps to C minor and breaks. Suddenly, Django rains down a cascade of chromatic notes from the top string; he descends via two gaping minor arpeggios held together by a jolting tritone, down three octaves to the bottom string; then, as nimble as a mountain goat, he ascends back up, just as quickly, on the same path he came by; he crowns the lick, in contrast to the vast intervals he just traversed, with with a tip-toeing series of semitones to reestablish the key and arrive triumphantly at the minor third. It’s a perfect lick. Both chiastic and chromatic. It’s also very hard to play.

Usually, it takes me a handful of warmup passes before I can play it all the way through. For the two or three smooth repetitions that follow, I ride a tide of indescribable joy and remember—this why I play guitar. But as quickly as it comes, so it also goes: an anxious energy rushes into my playing, corrupts my focus, and my coordination falls apart in a heinous wreckage of missed pick-strokes and clumsy fingerings. Defeated again, I fall back: like Sisyphus playing guitar, this lick is my boulder.

What haunts me most about the Blues en Mineur lick is not how complicated it is to play nor how fleeting my mastery of it is. No. What really haunts me is that Django did it in one take—something that’s near impossible for even trained guitarists to wrap their heads and fingers around, he came up with on the spot. Embodying the essence of jazz, this lick was born of improvisation, from his being wholly present within a moment. He probably didn’t even think about it: you might even say he didn’t play it. His fingers did.

In that moment of effortless mastery, he was listening to his playing more than thinking about his playing. A lick that takes two seconds to play has taken me years to learn; but he came up with it in the same two seconds that he played it. Rather than laboring over music theory or a performer’s techniques, he simply became the closest member of the audience, listening to music as it was happening. That music—that muse—impressed itself on him through his listening, such that it was the music that moved his fingers, not him. Django didn’t play the music: the music played Django.

That moment got me thinking about time and effort when it comes to reading and writing. Just like musicians who get lost somewhere in between their listening and playing, there’s often a disconnect between readers and writers: some readers can read mountains of books but can’t bring themselves to fill a single page with sentences; some writers can fill a journal faster than a gas tank, but find reading a slog. Both suffer.

Usually, the suffering comes from a misplaced sense of timing. Books are polyrhythmic phenomena: the mind wants to go at one tempo, the hand goes at another tempo, the eye goes at yet another. It’s a wonder we ever get these parts of us synchronized at all. The pace at which we read is not the pace at which we write, and there can be quite a difference between the two.

For the sake of round numbers, how long does 100 pages take us to get through? Let’s assume a standard page has 250 words. Naturally, there is tons of variance with reading speed based on the density of material, vocabulary, dyslexia, speed reading techniques, or even which typeface a book uses. But we’ll assume the average reading speed of 225 words per minute (midpoint of the range); this translates to a little over a minute on each page or 54 pgs per hour. All this means, the average reader will read 100 pages in about 112 minutes, or 1 hr 52 min. But to be even more generous, we’ll make it an even 2 hours.

To test out these numbers, I slipped into a bit of a novella kick as of late. There are several great books in the 100 pages range that I’ve enjoyed recently: Robert Lewis’ Stevensons’ Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde, Camus’ The Stranger, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, and most recently Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These. Naturally, there were some breaks to stretch the legs, reflect between chapters, fetch something to drink, or soothe my crying child. But breaks aside, these were all done in an evening and the time I actually spent reading was about 2 hours, all totaled.

If that’s how fast it is to read 100 pages, how long does it take to write 100 pages? Writing has an even greater variance than reading. Some writers are hares: Kazuo Ishiguro wrote The Remains of the Day in four weeks; Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road in three weeks; Stevenson wrote Jekyll & Hyde in 3 days. Some writers such as J.R.R. Tolkien and George R. R. Martin are famously tortoises. (Perhaps, if speed is your goal, you should avoid excessive world-building and remove any redundant R’s from your name.) But the award for slowest writer might have to go to, one of my favorites, Patrick Leigh Fermor, who made a trip on from Holland to Constantinople on foot, in 1933; he published the first part of his trip, A Time of Gifts in 1977 and the second part Between the Woods and the Water in 1986. Only in 2008 did he begin to write the final part, The Broken Road, which he left us as he passed away in 2011 at the age of 96. Between his first notes in 1933 and the final volume in 2011 stretched 78 years of writing.

But let’s assume you don’t need to come up with what to write. Let’s assume you know exactly what you need to write and you’re essentially copying it down from some imaginary manuscript in your mind’s eye. In that case, it would still take the average person around 15 hours to type 100 pages and it would take around 40 hours to hand write 100 pages. (If you wanted to type a novella on your phone with your thumbs, plan on setting aside at least 117 hours.) To sum up these 100 page figures:

Reading: 2 hrs
Typing: 15 hrs
Handwriting: 40 hrs
Thumb typing: 117 hrs

Clearly, there’s a stark difference between reading and writing. The average reader can read over half a dozen books for every one book a writer types, or twenty books for every book he handwrites. If writing 100 pages takes as much time as a part-time job or even full workweek, reading those pages can be done during a long lunch break.

How does the difference of pace and perceived duration change our experience of reading and writing? Because readers can tackle a work and revisit it several times in the same time it takes a writer to create one work, readers have a critical advantage over the writer. Insofar as writers are also readers, they know the speed of their creation cannot keep up with the speed of the readers’ consumption or comprehension of their work (not to mention, the other pressing demands of daily life a writer must tend to). Thus, feelings of inadequacy at how slow the work is going tends to trigger a vicious cycle, making the writer go even slower as he pauses to preread and precriticize his work. Thus, the classic image of the haughty, swiftly-judging critic and the frustrated, idling writer emerges—at the very least—from a difference in tempos.

But a recent technological innovation has dramatically slowed down the average reading tempo: audiobooks. When listening to an audiobook, people have 100 pages read to them in roughly 4 hrs 15 mins, rather than the normal 2 hrs by sight. There are several practical advantages to audiobooks: I’ve enjoyed listening the the adventures of Toad and Mole while walking in the woods or doing the dishes; I’ve gone for car rides with Thomas DeQuincey as he rhapsodizes about his voyages on opium; and while Homer gloriously (and gorily) recounts the battles of Troy, I’ve lifted weights as the arrows and spears swarmed around me. Along with the practical advantages, there are also psychological benefits to having a book read aloud to you. Many people claim that they comprehend audiobooks better than physical books: they feel more immersed in the stories; they get a better sense of a characters’ personality; they can see ideas more vividly. When a story is heard, it seems more real—more alive.

In order for us to grasp what an author is communicating through their writing, we must first recreate what we receive in ourselves. Our imagination translates the book from ink to thought. In this sense, reading is not a passive reception or information, but a creative action in its own right: reading rewrites the book in us. This is the case whether by audiobook or a traditional book mediated by the eyes.

What’s remarkable about audiobooks is that the speed of speaking and listening are the same. The physics of listening means that the speaker’s vocal cords or the sounding drums in our headphones vibrate at the same rate as the drums in our own ears: our acoustic bodies and the music of book shake at the same frequencies, which is to say at the same time. We are literally in a conversation with the book. Our imagination and the narrator occur simultaneously and collaboratively; we not only rewrite the book in our minds, but we are rewriting the book with the author at the same time. In listening to a story, our unique & personal existence finds itself—truly—harmonized with both the resonances of the world manifested by the story and the creative action of the one who tells the story. Only in sound can this physical union between listener, maker, and made come together in a present moment:

Sight isolates, sound incorporates. Whereas sight situates the observer outside what he views, at a distance, sound pours into the hearer. Vision dissects, as Merleau-Ponty has observed (1961). Vision comes to a human being from one direction at a time: to look at a room or a landscape, I must move my eyes around from one part to another. When I hear, however, I gather sound simultaneously from every directions at once; I am at the center of my auditory world, which envelopes me, establishing me at a kind of core of sensation and existence... You can immerse yourself in hearing, in sound. There is no way to immerse yourself similarly in sight…
Interiority and harmony are characteristics of human consciousness…
In a primary oral culture, where the word has its existence only in sound... the phenomenology of sound enters deeply into human beings' feeling for existence, as processed by the spoken word. For the way in which the word is experienced is always momentous in psychic life.
― Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word

This synchronized making of the world by speaking of words and hearing those words is the true sense of the Greek word ποίησις, or “poetry.” When considered in this way, we can say that poetry doesn’t necessarily describe what something is, but how it comes to be; transposed into an Aristotelean key, we could say poetry concerns itself less with the formal cause and more with the efficient cause. The rhythm, the rhyme, and the performance of a poem’s syllables cannot translated away or abstractly commented upon without dissolving the poem itself; they are the way in which the poem happens now, and the nowness is the point. Despite my attempts at rough estimates above—reading and writing are such dyssynchronous activities, that it’s hard to even say when exactly they happen. However, the heart of poetry is synchronicity. Poetry must always happen now.

It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.
― Wallace Stevens, “The Idea of Order at Key West”

Perhaps readers and writers shouldn’t take their inspiration from other readers or writers. Books are massive things: their hundreds of pages can take days, weeks, or months to read. If reading them can seem an interminable commitment, writing can seem even more insurmountably so. But what about the poet? How long does it take to write a poem? In a sense, as long as it takes to recite it. By contrast, thinking about what to write, choosing interesting angles on a given topic topics, reflecting on our characters or ideas and where they want to go, selecting just the right word—these are all ancillary to writing itself. The answer to the question “How long does it take to write a book?” only depends on whether you want to write it by hand, type it, or speak it. Those alone are writing itself.

The closer you are to speaking, the closer your work is to poetry. But the arts of reading and writing do not only aspire to the level of poetry, as Walter Pater pointed out: “all art aspires to the condition of music.” Since poetry without the moment has lost its essence, it turns out that poetry is really just a species of music—a music where words resound within and without at the same time.

Whether by reading or writing, sometimes we find the music of a book. In our reading, we find ourselves at one with the author and his world. In our writing, we find ourselves on the other side of the same moment—entering into a new world at the same time as we write it into being, freshly discovering it as the first reader of that world and the words that arise from it. By overcoming the clunky variances of their different tempos, reading and writing find themselves entered into a common conversation, into a balanced dance, into poetry, into music. Then, like Django, we listen and play at the same time.