For me, the importance of reading marathons is its transformation of a typically solitary activity into a group effort. It’s fun to breathe life into the words on a page, to perform its captured moments as you have imagined them, and see how your vision differs from other readers. I think especially at a time when people have begun to read less and less (oops), reading marathons remind us of the joy of storytelling, and the magic of reading as a social act. Even when you read alone, you still participate in a marathon with readers all around the world, reimagining the same words that have come alive for so many
The reading marathons bring together so many people who love literature to experience it as a temporal event and not only as a physical text. It allows us, the people grown so digital, to experience literature in a communal, physical, and sensory event.
The "marathon reading" commemorates the life that anthropos, the human being, has lived across the centuries with story. Before writing, there was story, of course; and before print and books such as novels, there were bards and minstrels and masters of narrative that had all the myths and all the cultural codes memorized. People came to hear those masters of story beguile the time and its hard realities. So there's nothing particularly newfangled about bingeing on narrative as we do in a "marathon reading." Keeping warm around the fire, we stare into it and watch its metamorphoses. We enter an almost hypnagogic state of loose attention and make figures in the embers we watch crush under their own weight and disperse into ash. In any case, a group of people lounging around on couches being held spellbound by the twists and turns of a story is surely one of the best ways humans ever devised for getting through winter. That's what a marathon reading is, really.
As we know, due to technological affordances, contemporary anthropoi (people) are now effectively swimming in "media," nearly all of it designed for sadly private consumption. Since the Earbud, the Sony Walkman, Edison's wax cylinders for recording sound, we've all been on a long slide that, if we're not careful, will surely end in human "life" and "experience" reduced to brains in a vat wired for stimulation.
The marathon reading, shall we say, taps the brakes on that larger "Netflix and chill" inevitability-- inviting contemporary anthropoi to come out of their media-soaked stupor and sit and to read a mid-19th century novel-- one written for the human voice-- together. As we saw in February with The Old Curiosity Shop reading, it's obviously retro and not at all everyone's cup of tea-- but it's also entirely radical. Like reading a novel at all, there's no world-altering reason to do it, and that space away from our quantifio-instrumental rationales for life may be its strongest suit. For the sheer seductive pleasures of the textual moment, for the gorgeous delights of inhabiting imagined other selves and other worlds, for the delicious sensualities of slowness, of imagination, and for the gradual accretion through humor, parody, and plot of moral sense-- for such things, there's nothing like a novel and nothing at all like reading it together, aloud, every word, all the way through, without stopping.
"Marathon," presumably mostly means "big," as in roughly 25 miles without stopping, as in a messenger's journey on foot from Marathon to Athens. But in the legend, the original runner, Pheidippides, arrived in Athens with a single two-word message on his lips which he delivered to those in Athens who could hear him about the outcome of the Greeks' war with Persia -- and two very fitting words indeed, not only for the Greeks on that day but also and to this very era for the geeks who put on marathon readings. Pheidippides' words before collapsing: "We won!"
I have participated in the English Department's marathon readings since they restarted in the 2000s with works like David Copperfield, Middlemarch, and Tristram Shandy. Their example inspired Medieval and Renaissance Studies to host marathon readings of sources from its time period including Beowulf, Milton's Paradise Lost, Njal's Saga, The Romances of Chrétien de Troyes, Cervantes' Don Quixote, and most recently J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit.
For me, the marathon readings bring out the pleasure of collective listening to a story unfold and also the pleasure of the many different styles of reading aloud and the ways in which voices can create people, scenes, moods, emotions, and more. Through their manner of reading, one also learns about people and their imaginations. I also love the marathon readings for the sense of common endeavor and esprit de corps: we are all--students, staff, faculty, neighbors--making this work come to life.
I imagine the reading marathons as a kind of hearth for students and faculty to gather around during the somewhat unbearable Winter term. Some readers may feel pressure to speak eloquently or punctually, but I believe their time on the podium also acts as a moment of reprieve from constant school work. Not only do the marathons allow students to casually practice public speaking, each new marathon also requires the reader to tap into their creativity and textual interpretation prowess. I hope the reading marathons serve the future generations of Carleton students and staff in much the same way. Moreover, I hope that the marathons guide the next generation into reading more often for their own enjoyment as the world continues to move more into a digital environment.
