Recognizing that nobody is meant to read all of the Kolyma stories straight through

I've reached the halfway point in book 2 (The Left Bank) of Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Stories (NYRB press, Rayfield ed. and tr.), which is halfway through the volume (the first of 2 projected volumes of his short fiction) and I'm going to stop at this point - not because of anything wrong w/ these stories or with this edition except that it really feels that nobody is meant to read straight through this work. Each piece is powerful both as fiction and as part of the documentary record of the Soviet prison camps in the Stalin era. Reading them in sequences for nearly 400 pages, however, dulls the effect; it's too much for anyone to absorb and it was never meant to be such. Imagine if each of these stories appeared in a weekly journal spread out over one or two years: That would be the best way to read through the material. (I'm reading from a library edition, so I can't stretch out the reading that long.) Not a single story misses a note. I suspect that the 6 books in the projected two-volume edition were arranged by the original Russian editors, in the 1980s or so?, by topic/theme: Book One (clearly the most significant) tells of life in the Siberian mines, a story virtually unknown as so few survived to tell it. The 2nd book, The Left Bank, recounts VS's experience and observations during his stint as an orderly or aid in a hospital for the convicted prisoners - some political prisoners, others gangsters and other ruffians. Obviously there is constant tension between these two groups, and VS also recounts some of the extreme measures that the prisoners took avoid being sent back to the mines; altogether, these stories are longer than the Kolyma stories in book one and involve somewhat more character and plot development. It's amazing that VS survived to write these stories - so many, and over a period of about a decade during which he was clearly in bad health physically and mentally - and all this w/ no likelihood of publication during his lifetime. It's great that we have these volumes - though I do wish that NYRB had issued each book separately for a more reader-friendly 6-volume set (rather than 2 gargantuan editions).