There is a pithy saying about books that should be articles, articles that should be sentences, and sentences that shouldn’t exist. On one hand, I empathize with this. But that’s mainly when I’m in an assigned-reading mindset and feel semi-resentful that I have to read anything at all. When I’m in free-will-reading mindset, I find myself feeling the opposite way: wishing a good book would be multiple volumes that I could spend months with. 

I think another way to put this is that the former approach is about means-to-an-end (absorbing information, enhancing knowledge) whereas the latter is about reading as an end in itself. It’s unsettling how often the first approach seeps into situations where it doesn’t seem to apply — especially for a student of English like myself who has been so deeply conditioned to read for credit. But I do think there’s a larger cultural assumption driving this: that everything should have a “larger purpose,” whatever that might be — nevermind the fact that we often fail to ever arrive at that larger purpose.

I was always surprised in publishing to see how this matched the sales performance of books. It seems, from that perspective, a book couldn’t be too short. Less than 150 pages? No problem. All the better. Anything over 300 pages was usually considered a liability, and I often heard the phrase “feather in our cap” being thrown around as rationale for why the Press was publishing it. 

I’m torn on this: on one hand, I don’t doubt there are some monographs that are pure ego trips on the parts of their authors. And there are issues of accessibility at play here: people who have the time and energy to read an 800-page book tend to be people of a certain level of privilege.

So I’m not blaming individual readers, but suggesting that something’s wrong that people are forced to structure their lives in such a way where they don’t have the capacity to read long books. I think there’s a larger issue lurking beneath this one: that we have rendered ourselves mostly incapable of doing things like reading as an end in itself. Many of us are chasing some elusive “purpose” and ending up deeply unhappy as a result of not being able to exist in the present. 

There’s something satisfying about completing several short books in a few weeks. It feels productive. But there’s something far more gratifying about working through one extensive, complex book in that same amount of time. These are the books that have stuck with me for much longer: like the summer of 2021 when I read In Search of Lost Time. I felt immersed in it. It structured that whole time period in a way a shorter book couldn’t have. I will always think of that summer as the Summer of Proust. 

May others be given the space in their lives to have time periods in their lives shaped by what they read. We all deserve the opportunity to evolve over the course of a long reading commitment. This is a much larger issue than just one the publishing industry can take on — let alone any individual publishing company. But I hope that a few stubborn editors remain who continue to sneak as many long books into the pipeline as they can in the face of the continuing pressure to make books shorter and shorter.