Oral Histories

"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."

- Yiming Ma ‘27

""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!""

- Prof. Peter Baalam

"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."

- Anonymous