On Thursday, Feb. 19 and Friday, Feb. 20, the English Department will host a marathon reading of Charles Dickens’ 1841 comic novel “The Old Curiosity Shop.” From noon on Thursday to 9 p.m. on Friday, 68 people, including Carleton faculty, staff and students and Northfield residents, will read the novel without any breaks. Professor Michael Kowalewski organized the event, along with other English professors and student employees. 

In an email to various departments, Kowalewski described the event as a “grand tradition…that stretches back to the early 1990’s” and centers on “publicly reading a long and entertaining work of fiction that is too long to include in a trimester class.”

“Marathon readings are indeed a longstanding tradition in the English department: over the years, we’ve made our way through Middlemarch, Emma, David Copperfield, Tristram Shandy, and even Gravity’s Rainbow,” said Constance Walker, Professor of English. “[In previous years] students have stayed for the whole of the marathons, bringing pjs and pillows to the Sayles balcony.”

Kowalewski began the annual tradition after starting a marathon reading of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow while teaching at Princeton University. 

“It’s a huge, long, sort of unreadable novel that is never taught in classes because it’s too unwieldy…when I came to Carleton, I told faculty and students about this and I said, we could do that,” said Kowalewski. “It was very funny…There’s a lot of really raunchy parts of that novel and we would try to get the president to sign up without them realizing what they were going to have to read.”

The marathon reading became an annual tradition for the English department and interested students throughout the nineties. The most memorable marathon, according to Kowalewski, was the reading of Lawrence Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy” in 1995. 

“Tim Raylor had arranged for somebody at Shandy Hall in England, which is the place where Lawrence Sterne wrote the novel, to join us at the beginning of it,” Kowalewski said, referring to Timothy Raylor, Professor Emeritus of English. “There were some wonderful performances of that novel, but there was also this huge snowstorm that happened…We called it the Shandy Snowstorm.”

However, the event ceased being an annualtradition in 1997 until it was revived for three years between 2012 and 2015. 

“People lost interest a little bit in [the marathon], doing it every year,” Kowalewski said. “We let it go.”

Kowalewski is currently teaching an independent reading course on The Old Curiosity Shop with a group of eight students. The novel follows Little Nell Trent and her grandfather as they flee London to escape Daniel Quilp, a vicious money-lender, and his lawyer Sampson Brass.

“It was really more of a book club than a typical English class,” said Cecilia Samadani ’26, one of the students in the class and a member of the English Department Curriculum Committee (DCC). “It was just getting to read and talk about things we found interesting about the book.”

Four English seniors are currently members of the DCC and are responsible for “put[ting] on events and also talk[ing] about changes in the department,” Samadani said. Kowalewski was inspired to revive the marathon readings this year by his independent reading course.

“Mike is retiring this year, and he’s the one who started the marathon reading,” Samadani said. “We were talking about this a lot this term, like Mike, what really long book do we want to read for your last marathon?”

Along with Kowalewski, DCC members debated which book to propose for the marathon reading. Previous books read in the marathons have been long eighteenth- and nineteenth-century with comic, entertaining, raunchy or provocative elements.

“I mentioned [the marathon] to the DCC, and…Cecilia Samadani was in the reading group and on DCC, so [the DCC] jumped on board and is helping us to organize it and publicize it,” Kowalewski said.

Professor Arnab Chakladar helped publicize the marathon, sharing information about the event and the sign-up sheet with English majors and students interested in the department. Chakladar has participated in previous marathons with Kowalewski. 

“I remember reading in the Middlemarch marathon and in the David Copperfield marathon,” Chakladar said. “The latter took place in 2012 and commemorated the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’ birth. The Copperfield marathon was the one which revived the English department’s marathon tradition […] I’m looking forward to the return of Dickens to Sayles.”

According to Kowalewski, the event will begin on Thursday, with a special guest, followed by Peter Balaam, Chair of the English Department, who will read the first 10 pages of the novel.

“We are going to be able to Zoom in the great-great-great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens, Luncida Hawksley, from London,” Kowalewski said. 

Throughout the marathon, multiple students currently on the Living London Off-Campus Studies (OCS) will also participate in the reading through Zoom. Participants also include professors from the English and History departments, as well as members of the wider Northfield community.

“I’m bringing in an emeritus professor, Jim McDonalds…he’s English-Irish so he can do the Cockney accents of a lot of Dickens’ characters,” Kowalewski said. “And then […] Charlie Black […] he lives in town and is a retired high school teacher who did a lot of theater at Northfield High School.”

“There are some very, very good readers,” Kowalewski added.

Students from various class years and majors will be participating in the reading. Kowalewski reached out to previous students, previous marathon participants, and those with “Great Promise as a reader,” according to the informational email. 

“My sister got invited to the marathon by her old professor and wanted to bring me,” Piper Crosby ’28 said, referring to Kowalewski.

By inviting faculty, staff, students and Northfielders, Kowalewski hopes to create a “community that brings people together around literature.” 

“There’s a cheerful insanity to the proposition of a large number of people reading a large book out loud in sequence in a public space,” Chakladar said. “The marathons do nothing in a utilitarian sense, but they remind us that reading is fun, that culture is communal and that the pleasures of language are infinite.”

Additionally, the marathons seek to foster a culture of reading beyond the classroom.

“People don’t get a chance to read out loud … it’s a wonderful kind of lost art form that I really hope people realize how much fun it is,” Kowalewski said. “Giving people the chance to realize what a pleasure it is to read good literary writing out loud is one of the main reasons why I enjoy doing [the marathon].”