Does size matter? And no, I am not asking the obvious question with the obvious connotation. I ask this question as a quick mental survey of my favourites in books, music and films seemed to show that I tend to veer towards the large.
For ten years I was the Chairman of the Suffolk Villages Festival which took place in churches in Suffolk over the August Bank Holiday. The music played at this festival was early music, the most up to date we ever got was Mozart, the earliest Monteverdi, and was performed on original instruments. I knew zilch about this musical genre when I joined the committee and then became Chairman, but what I did know about was How to Organise Things so that was my main function. Over the years I slowly grew to love the music I was listening to and became quite knowledgeable about the musical functions of the theorbo and lute. However, I have to say that after sitting through a concert featuring Purcell, Arne and Bach I used to yearn for a bit of va-va-voom and would bang on a CD of Mahler or Wagner when I got home to restore a bit of balance. Theorbos and lutes are all very well but nothing beats standing in the arena at an Albert Hall Prom with a massive orchestra all going like the clappers, a huge choir of massed voices standing at the back and all joining in at the end, preferably with the Albert Hall organ shaking the floor. Great stuff. I think the musical director of the Festival knew of my preferences and apart from a violent shudder whenever I mentioned Wagner in his hearing, he held his peace.
Now films – when I cast an eye over the films I go to see at the cinema, as opposed to home watching, my tastes tend to run to large popular epics: Titanic, The Gladiator, Independence Day, Chicago, Spiderman and the entire Harry Potter and James Bond oeuvres. All good clean fun with lots of car chases, fights, swinging from windows and magical tricks, but hardly intellectual. I like my cinema going to be non-intellectual. If I want to watch a more ‘serious’ smaller film or a foreign movie with sub-titles, I prefer to sit quietly at home, on my own, with the DVD and concentrate on it. I get a quiet satisfaction then.
Books – I became addicted to large, fat books when I first read Gone with the Wind at age 14. I sat down and did not move for three days until I had devoured every page of it and spent the following week floating around pretending I was Scarlett O’Hara and dreaming that Clark Gable would come and sweep me off my feet, ears and all (his not mine!). I used to read Jilly Cooper when her books were quite slim but then as her career took off her books got fatter and fatter, and as they all featured the simply divine Rupert Campbell-Black, I was more than happy. However, her last one, Wicked, is over 800 pages long which I think is perhaps too much of a good thing.
I do not want to give the impression that only popular blockbusters are fat and large. Bleak House and David Copperfield both have over 800 pages; a whole section of my book shelves is full of fat Trollopes (sorry could not resist); Middlemarch and Adam Bede are pretty hefty and last year I sunk under the weight of Dr Strange and Mr Norrell. I now have waiting in my TBR box The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox, also doorstep size.
Main problem with all of these of course is they are too heavy to take on the commute to London, one arm would be longer than the other with carting them around and, as they have to go into my bag which houses my lunch, umbrella, back up book just in case I finish the Mighty Tome and am stranded in the middle of nowhere on a broken down train (always a possibility), my make up bag, bottle of water, bar of chocolate (emergency rations in case of aforementioned break down) and sundry other odds and sods, you can see it is just not possible. They are also difficult to read in bed where a lot of my reading takes place.
But in case you think I go for quantity over quality I should add that in the last month I have read Mr Thundermug by Cornelius Medvei, The Woman in Black by Susan Hill and Lying Awake by Mark Salzman all of which come in at under 200 pages. They were all perfect books, just the right length and one sentence more or less would have been totally extraneous.
Also, they were JUST right for slipping in my handbag.
