Big books have never really been my thing. The sweeping epics, the Great Russian Novels by the Great Russian Writers, the thousand-page masterpieces: it’s a whole subgenre that I’ve never bothered to crack (I was worryingly going to admit that the longest book I’ve read might have Harry Potter in the title, but a search reveals that “Our Mutual Friend” clocks in at eight hundred and eighty pages—with a sensibly small font!—so I guess I am an adult after all). In college, studying the British Empire and then contemporary fiction, the books were often dense but never staggeringly heavy. These days, most of my choices hover in the three-hundred-something-pages range, which makes for a nice, uniform bookshelf but doesn’t say much about me as a reader. But I live in New York City; who wants to lug a thousand pages around on the subway?

So with all this in mind, I read Mark O’Connell’s piece at The Millions last week with a kind of detached, anthropological amusement. “The Stockholm Syndrome Theory of Long Novels” is a fantastic essay, chronicling O’Connell’s journey from a reading life of quality over quantity—he calls himself a “Slim Prestige Volume man”—to one in which he’s devoured by the gargantuan classics. He starts with “Gravity’s Rainbow,” and he writes:

I can’t say that I enjoyed every minute of it, or even that I enjoyed all that much of it at all, but I can say that by the time I got to the end of it I was glad to have read it. Not just glad that I had finally finished it, but that I had started it and seen it through. I felt as though I had been through something major, as though I had not merely experienced something but done something, and that the doing and the experiencing were inseparable in the way that is peculiar to the act of reading.

The big metaphor at work is the Stockholm Syndrome: these books kidnap you, hold you hostage, and make you love them, despite all their faults and your anger and frustration along the way. O’Connell makes a good case for all of this—I like thinking about the act of reading, and about the idea of a book having ownership of its reader—but, I must admit, I didn’t exactly rush out to buy a copy of “Ulysses,” either.

All this put me in mind of a letter written to the editor of The Paris Review, Lorin Stein, on the Review’s blog a few months back. The writer asks:

I always tell people that my favorite book is “Infinite Jest,” and even though I haven’t gotten halfway through it, it’s still the best half of a book that I have ever read! Do you have any guilt from unread books floating around?

Now this was something I was shamefully, intimately familiar with. My bookshelf is crammed with books I’ve kind of almost kind of read, and even more damning (here’s hoping my former professors don’t read this), with books assigned for classes that I only ever read half of (and proceeded to discuss and, in some sad cases, write papers about). Stein bravely lists a good few dozen books he’s read bits of and, one assumes, regularly lies (by omission, of course) about having finished—and it’s no surprise that quite a few titles from O’Connell’s long books discussion, including “Gravity’s Rainbow,” pop up there.

But that’s not what brought the two together in my mind. On one hand, we have big, painful books we feel compelled to see through to the end. On the other, the books we’ve sort of read and glibly lie about having finished. Both of these seem tied to some sort of reading scorecard, one in which the readers are measured and judged by—perhaps even more than—the books that they’ve read. If you hate a movie, you probably have no qualms about turning it off or walking out of the theatre, and the blame is placed on the film and those who made it, not on your movie-watching abilities. By the same token, no one will pat you on the back for watching something long and difficult, but they will if you’ve read "Ulysses" (and if you’ve given up halfway through, no one can blame you, though if you lie and say you finished it, I guess you’re in good company).

But is the reading scorecard internal or external? Or are the two so entwined that it’s impossible to answer that question? I used to keep a list of the books I’d read on my blog, but I took it down because I began to feel like I was keeping score (though now, unfortunately, I can barely remember what I read three months ago). In a post Jeannie wrote about virtual bookshelves a few weeks ago, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh said that the reason he eagerly and frequently posts what he’s read to his Facebook profile is purely selfish: “I hate to admit this: I don’t look to see what anybody else is reading. I just do it for myself. Maybe it harkens back to the summer I was eight years old and signed up at the public library to read x number of books. I ended up winning a transistor radio.”

Last fall, I met up with a friend in Central Park, and as we passed the field glasses back and forth he told me, with the sort of glazed-over, walking-wounded expression that O’Connell prescribes to people who’ve wrestled with a big book, that he’d just finished “A Dance to the Music of Time” and felt as if he’d “lost a limb.” When I asked him about it again recently, he said he enjoyed it, though he felt “almost as if ‘reading’ as an activity became reading that particular book. So when it came to reading something else, it felt ultra weird and unnatural.” Maybe that’s exactly the point. Good books, no matter what their length, should suck you in and change the way you read, momentarily or, in the very best cases, permanently. The thought’s enough to make me want to stop nodding along with Lorin Stein when people bring up the classics I’ve shirked. I’ll be buying a sturdier bag to schlep around a few masterpieces on my daily commute.