Admission: I once read James Joyce’s Ulysses. All 752 pages of it.

I tackled it for my 12^th-grade English term paper, connecting its story with that of Homer’s Odyssey.  I’m proud to say I got an A- from a notoriously strict teacher (and more importantly, impressed a female classmate).  However, I can’t say that I properly appreciated the book.  After all, what did a 17-year-old boy know about Molly Bloom’s orgasms?

The reason I mention this is not to impress you with my scholarship, but just the opposite.      Recently, The Huffington Post had a story about thirteen famous works of literature that everyone knows about but hardly anyone has actually read, and Ulysses was the only one I’d ever completed.  From Chaucer to Proust, from War and Peace to Moby Dick, the list was filled with books that I’ve learned enough about by osmosis to answer the occasional Jeopardy question or fill in 54-Down in the crossword puzzle, but not to discuss at any length.

This used to bother me, enough so that a couple of years ago, I vowed to devote some time to the classics I had avoided.  This attempt to sweat to the literary oldies lasted less than a week.  By Chapter 2 of Crime and Punishment, when Raskolnikov endures a barroom monologue from Marmeladov, I was so dizzy from sorting out the –nikovs from the –ovnas that I felt I could justify a homicide myself.  A quarter of the way through Joseph Conrad’s novella-length Heart of Darkness, my interest had sunk as distressingly as Marlow’s ship.  Thus the hernia-inducing copies of Les Miserables and Anna Karenina that I had invested in began to gather dust on my shelf.

I was quickly reminded of the tedium I experienced in school while plowing through a major example of the “canon.” Even in the pre-IM/sexting days of the 1960s, Jane Austen’s tales of separated lovers and their long, repressed letters of longing seemed comically irrelevant to me.  Instead of chugging down the hip, contemporary stylings of Kesey and Heller, my English teachers were shoving Silas Marner and The Mayor of Casterbridge down my regurgitating throat.  My love of reading was seriously wounded, but somehow it survived.

At my age, as I realize the limits of my time on Earth, I no longer feel the need to plod through long, stilted writing out of some sense of cultural obligation. I have gotten to age 59 as a relatively intelligent, sophisticated man without reading every word of Ahab’s pursuit, and I don’t believe I’ll feel any poorer about it at death’s door.  After all, I haven’t read the Declaration of Independence from beginning to end either, but I know what’s in it and I understand its importance.

That’s another key word: long.  A lot of the classics are long.  So are a lot of new novels. I no longer have much interest in long.  I now blanch when someone recommends a novel that tops 400 pages. It begins to seem like a major commitment of time, a commitment that would intrude on other things more important to me.  I no longer do major commitments.  When I pick up a book in which I’m interested, and I learn it’s only around 250 pages, I want to kiss the author on the mouth. Right now, I’m reading Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, which feels just right at 334 pages.

For example, Don DeLillo’s 827-page Underworld sits on my bookshelf unopened, and I’m sure it will remain that way.  I’m aware that, in the time it would take to read this one novel, I could read the entire collected writings of Jhumpa Lahiri, who I adore.  Or, to transpose from the latest issue of Mental Floss, I could read all of the following ground-breaking works: Common Sense, The Cat in the Hat, The Prince, Civil Disobedience, The Elements of Style, The Art of War and the Communist Manifesto.  And then I could read them all a second time.  And still have time left over to take my family to dinner and a movie.

To be fair, I’ve enjoyed many long novels.  I devoured Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow when it was released in the early 1970s.  When I traveled cross-country and back in the early 1980s, The Grapes of Wrath and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song were my traveling companions. But back then I was young, when time and possibilities seemed endless.

There was a time I imagined myself writing the Great American Novel, a brilliant tome with an epic story, a cast of thousands and each page dripping with insight into the human condition.  In retrospect, the only thing it would have been dripping with would have been grandiosity.  I have learned that, while I may feel compelled to write, nobody is compelled to read.  I have come to appreciate concise prose.

Writers strike a bargain with their readers: my words, and the entertainment, drama and insight they provide, are worth your commitment of time.  But as the work lengthens, the commitment gets more demanding.  Perhaps if you’re an established author – a Stephen King or a Jonathan Franzen – you can make that demand.  For the rest, that demand seems like an act of arrogance and self-love.  Frankly, dear author, if you want somebody to watch you masturbate, do us all a favor and install a mirror above your bed.  I for one have more rewarding things to do with my time.

Though, speaking of masturbate, I did enjoy Portnoy’s Complaint.  All 304 pages of it.