To write well, one must read. That's an almost worn-out cliché, but many folks assume that to write well, one should read only the sort of prose to which one aspires to write. But doesn't it make sense to read all sorts of authors to broaden one's base? Sure! And that brings us to the fat books, the ones that either tire your arms when you read in bed or, if you can only afford paperbacks, fall apart in the middle before you've finished. But there's a lot of nifty stuff even in those books that we were required to at least sample in the public schools. And many of those were, indeed fat books.
        When one reads fat books, one finds the mind starting to coast along, in the rhythm of the story but not really lurching up and down with each bump in the prose-road. Then the hind wheel drops into a pothole and the whole carriage stops with a jerk. One such hole I hit when I was (semi-consciously) grinding through War and Peace for the second time after a hiatus of some decades. And the spot? Near the beginning of the book, bang!
        "He was wearing a dark green waistcoat, trousers the color of cuisse de nymphe effrayée, as he said himself, stockings and shoes."
        After a bit of digging to find the translation in the notes (and another bit of digging to find my magnifying glass) I read the English translation: "thigh of a frightened nymph."
        Now, will I ever write a story in which that phrase will fit snugly without my carefully shaving off the edges? Nope. But the next hour of my reading was pestered by the far-off hum of "cuisse-cuisse-cuisse." It was not a bit that I could even use with clever paraphrasing. But it was one of those little pinholes in the screen that allow us to see much beyond if we squint a little.
        Would you ever use that term, "thigh of a frightened nymph" in your writing? Or in your barroom conversation? Hardly. But Prince Ippolit did, if only to himself. Thighs of nymphs, frightened or not, were already part of his mind-closet.
        Yes, it was stuck there, and that tells us much about him. It was a situation beyond his control. Ever try to unthink something? Later in the same tome we find Pierre stuck in the same sort of mind-bog:
        "It was as if the main screw in his head, which held his whole life together, had become stripped. The screw would not go in, would not come out, but turned in the same groove without catching hold, and it was impossible to stop turning it."
        One needn't know much about screws to understand that. The pivotal phrases are "without catching hold" and "impossible to stop turning it." And so, although we won't risk using that phrase lest the next hundred people we meet are Tolstoy fans, we will keep that image. Especially "impossible" part.
        Yes, these big, fat, sometimes boring books do have some nifty bits. After all, who would read War and Peace if it was as dull as the people it portrays? It reminds me a bit of the works of Bierce, who excellently pictured the war but used his talent to show just how stupid and self-centered even the leaders were. We need the Bierces and Tolstoys to show us the folly of thinking that war and glory are good things to have. Or even serious, at the level of the leading characters.
        War always makes good press, and good prose. It often makes the careers of the otherwise pedestrian writers. But everyone good at war-prose knows that it is peopled. And these peoples

 have lives and feelings and selfishness. And pathos. They are the fine-structure, the molecules of world events.
        "In her dressing room, with a glass of brandy at hand, she ran a hot bath and set about the dismantling job under glaring lights between large mirrors. Off came the rouge, the lipstick, the mascara, and the skin makeup which she wore down to her collar bone."
        In War and Remembrance, Wouk has to deal with people, right down to the fine-structure of their beings. Here is a woman, no longer young, who has to come to grips with herself and her changing body. We needn't to know the details of what she had to do to make herself a beauty, the word "dismantling" does it all. It is her war inside the greater war.
        And, voila, you might also find your mind humming "collar bone - collar bone" as it before hummed "thigh - thigh." Well, pal, it's your mind.
        We can, indeed, get real gems out of the cavernous mines of the fat books. Here is one that I admit I have used, albeit with some discreet changes, because it says what I lacked the wit to construct myself. But that is what we do. I admit it was a conscious intent; often our plagiarism is unconscious and, blessedly, unnoticed. Anyway, here it is, from Eliot's Middlemarch:
        "News is often dispersed as thoughtlessly and effectively as that pollen which the bees carry off (having no idea how powdery they are) when they are buzzing in search of their particular nectar."
        No, the bees don't want to spread the gossip. Often they are oblivious of it. They have a more focussed errand. But there it is - powder wherever one wants to sweep it up. Or not.
        Sometimes just a small phrase sticks and we hold it and even use it in some form long after we put down the book. That's why it's so maddeningly difficult  to separate our sinning plagiarism from our unintentional responding to our Ohrwurms. One such I feel deserves to be chiseled in stone somewhere. Sadly, despite it's effect on my thinking when I found it, I had a devil's time even finding it again.
        "His mother's love for Martin was so jealous, so violent and so intense that it seemed to make the heart hoarse."
        Oh, sure, now I know - it's from Podvig by Nabokov. Another forgotten book. One thing that is so refreshing about the works of foreign authors like Nabokov and Tolstoy (and many others) is that they are free of American cliches, having been written first in the author's native language.
        In The Cardinal, Robinson treated the heart problem differently, again in a way not a cliché:
        "Breaking pastoral ties, Stephen discovered, was like breaking the point off his heart."
        Fat books, in some cases, are the only examples of an author's works the reader remembers. And these are the books most likely to be available, often free. They offer the writer a cornucopia of prose that most popular (and shorter) works do not. They seldom went up against the modern wall of economics we have to face today. Often they were works that required years to complete. They are what we would produce given enough time (and space). They are worth reading. None can be digested at one sitting, unless one is a passenger on a Mars shuttle. But that doesn't matter. We aren't trying to learn Russian history, just broadening our stock of clever ways to say things.