In praise of short books: to start and finish in one sitting is a rare, unbridled joy
In recent weeks and months, more by chance than planning, I’ve been reading more much shorter books than I usually do. A slow and careful reader, I take on average a week to finish a 300-page novel (I once read that most adult novels are between 70,000 to 120,000 words). Nonfiction books usually take me significantly longer.
I recently took six weeks to finish Mister Mister by Guy Gunaratne (374 pages) for a review – but that had as much to do with my walking away after every 20 or so pages, sometimes for days, to contemplate the provocation of this fine novel.
But the more concise book – the novel of 55,000 words, the novella of, say, 35,000 and the extended essay of 30,000 words – has really been grabbing me lately.
We – I – do live in a binge culture. We’ve been primed to want it all now. Every episode of each series of a made-for-streaming drama in a weekend. Give it to me. The entire audio-book on a road trip or sleepless night. Now please. All episodes of that fantastic podcast on a long flight. Download.
It’s like having a small portion of your favourite meal. And retaining space to immediately savour it again
All of this, of course, challenges our attention and fragments our concentration when it comes to the written word. Especially in the form of a book, best read when the device is in another room – or the fridge.
But the shorter book may be something of an antidote to this. So allow me to tell, briefly, of its virtues.
To sit after dinner one evening, start a book and finish it by bedtime without moving is an unbridled joy. Or to read half a book in 45 minutes one evening, to go to sleep thinking about it and wake up excited at the prospect of reading the rest before work, feels like such a guilty and rewarding pleasure.
Recently, while immersed in both Mister Mister and the divisive Bret Easton Ellis’s The Shards (rollicking, unsettling and brilliant, in my view; 177,905 words, 608 pages), I reread – for the fourth, maybe fifth time – Kenneth Cook’s classic Wake In Fright (56,000 words, 224 pages) in a few hours one night. It’s a masterful work of very skilful brevity; a thoughtful, fast-paced ride into a boozy, macho, violent, misogynistic national interior – an antipodean Heart of Darkness. It followed me into my dreams. I woke, if not quite in fright, then certainly with it front of consciousness.
In for a penny: given I was already in that headspace, a few days later I reread, in a sitting, Joseph Conrad’s actual Heart of Darkness (38,000 words, 109 pages).
On the nonfiction front, earlier this month in two 45-minute sittings, I read Jeanne Ryckmans’ tense, elegantly written (and disarmingly black-humoured) Trust. At 30,000 words and 119 pages, it is a hang-on-tight rollercoaster of emotion and foreboding.
Last week it was Claire Keegan’s 2022 Booker prize-shortlisted Small Things Like These. This might just be the most perfectly formed short fiction I’ve ever read (at 116 pages and 35,282 words, it meets novella classification – somewhere between 10,000 and 40,000 words, though many contemporary writers would prefer their book be known as a short novel or simply a novel). I did it in two sittings over consecutive evenings wondering, in the waking and sleeping time between, how Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant in a small Irish town, would solve – or salve – his burning moral dilemma. It’s a beautiful, succinct meditation on humanity that I can’t imagine being any longer. Though I wanted more of the same. Perhaps that is the marker of literary success when it comes to the small novel, novella or whatever you might call it.
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Reading near-perfectly executed shorter books is naturally making me wonder ever more so, as both reader and writer, if less is, perhaps, more.
I know that writing the short novel (or nonfiction book) is an enviable skill. Loss of direction seeks concealment in wordiness. In brevity there’s nowhere to hide. And all serious writers will know that landing a 120-page piece of fiction involves so many heart-wrenching, darling-killing decisions of omission that the 500-page novel doesn’t demand.
Now here is the thing – when you’re finished and you’re still marvelling at the writerly skill and pondering the emotions evoked in you, you can do it all again in a couple of hours.
It’s like having a small portion of your favourite meal. And retaining space to immediately savour it again.
