Marginal Notes: Kenneth Fearing

The Big Clock

It’s rare that I fly through a book in three days anymore. I don’t know how other writers do it—the ones who are reading five books a week and somehow still writing books of their own. Pleasure reading has become a somewhat foreign concept, but that’s less dire than it sounds because most of my research reading is pleasurable. I don’t write books about things that won’t hold my interest for two or three years. Since I’m starting truly fresh, with a shiny new book project, for the first time in my grown-up full-time writer life, there’s an element of “Pinch me, I’m dreaming!” involved as I put together a research syllabus. Maybe it’s a hangover from graduate school, the utter disbelief that I occasionally get to curl up with a cup of coffee and read forgotten old novels and call it work.