That's Just Insipid!

A recent cogitation:

I've been taking a lot of television series DVDs out of the library, most recently the first and second seasons of Cheers. I'm also currently in a torrid monogomous reading relationship with Dickens's Dombey and Son. While our generation is used to sitcoms being first released for consumption in weekly/seasonal form, it is somewhat estranged from us to comprehend the release of a novel in installments and not all at once. There are notes at the end of every fourth or fifth chapter that indicate when, originally, that month's segment had ended. At 800+ pages, this means the book when first published took more than a year to fully come out!

And, conditioned as I am by the late 20th century, it seems more unnatural to watch back-to-back episodes of Cheers (sometimes four or five in a sitting) than to engage this tome all at once. I'm tempted to stop reading so voraciously and to force myself to pause at the end of each "episode" in order to share in the original Victorian experience of a Dickens book. Likewise, I'm itching to brew a full pot of coffee some night this week and project as many episodes as will fit into the night's darkness -- which allows me to project more vividly onto the wall in my "personal" study/room.

Reading, it goes without saying, progresses more slowly than viewing (especially television).