The infusion regimen I follow for Kyprolis ^[1] (carfilzomib) is two con­secu­tive days a week, three con­secu­tive weeks in a round, rest one week, repeat. Each session lasts two hours, more or less, so in any com­plete round of treatment I spend 12 or more hours of en­forced down­time, sitting in a chair while chemicals drip into my body.

What to do, what to do?

I don’t carry a tablet. I don’t have a smart phone, just a way retro flip phone from which I text only. I don’t knit, crochet, cross stitch, or quilt. In short, there are no handcrafts to while away the hours.

Oh, and I don’t watch television in any form.

But I do read. Voraciously and quickly. I read books, not e-readers in any form. I know: e-readers are so much more convenient, portable, blah blah blah. I don’t care for the format. I am hopelessly wedded to tangible books I can hold in my hand.

So I started out the Kyprolis adventure schlepping books to and from the clinic. The issue that I kept running into was coming up with enough books to last me two hours, then coming up with enough material the next day to cover another two hours.

I got tired of carrying multiple books in my bag. I got tired of sorting through my library books and trying to estimate how long a book would last. Was I close to the end and had to bring a second book?

After three rounds, the answer was stunningly obvious. Read Big Books.

You know what a Big Book is. A Big Book is one of those mighty tomes that somewhere along the line some­one, maybe yourself in a younger incarnation, said you must read to be well-rounded. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. War and Peace. Ulysses (James Joyce) followed by The Odyssey (Homer). The com­plete works of William Shakespeare, including his sonnets. The Tale of Genji. The Magic Mountain.

Those kind of books.

For my first Big Book, I chose War and Peace for the sole reason that I had bought a paperback edition of it in high school and never read it. My original copy is long gone, although for the decades I owned it, it criss­crossed the United States as I moved around and had several thousand miles under its belt. I never read it during those years, mind you. I just thought about reading it. Even in tiny print (I think it was printed in 6 point type), it was a hefty book. The paperback I bought this time around was in 10 point, I believe, but still a hefty book.

Isn’t that the whole point of a Big Book? To be hefty?

War and Peace took approximately five rounds of Kyprolis to read. (My one rule of chemo reading is that I not read the Big Book outside of my infusion time.) I managed to end it right at the end of Round 8, timing I could not have planned if I tried.

So what did I think of War and Peace forty-plus years after I first meant to read it?

It wasn’t a waste of time. (Trust me, I would have abandoned it if I felt that way. I may be geeky with my Big Book reads, but I’m not stupid.) I now know that Pierre and Natasha end up happily married, which made me glad for them both. And I know a lot more about what Tolstoy thought of Napoleon and his ill-fated invasion of Russia than I ever really needed to know.

I saw a cartoon, “Abridged Editions,” about a week after finishing War and Peace, which summed it up in two sentences. “Everyone is sad. It snows a lot.” That’s not a bad summary, Natasha and Pierre excepted.

The next choice, which I started on Day 1 of Round 9, my current round, was easy. Moby-Dick, the Great American Novel. I last read Moby-Dick in freshman humanities at college. In short, also a long time ago. At age 18, I read it as a young adult. I strongly suspect that at age 60, I will read it from an entirely different perspective. Fifteen chapters into it already, this has proven true. Among other things, I am a more patient reader (albeit still fast) than I was at 18.

A close friend who is currently reading and listening to Moby-Dick lent me The Whale, a nonfiction work on whales, whaling, Moby-Dick, Melville, and the wonders of the oceans. My friend meant it as sort of a prelude to my beginning Moby-Dick. After finishing that book, I want to go whale watching. By the time I finish Moby-Dick, I will probably want to go whaling.

Call me Ishmael.