When it comes to reading, I have a few rules. I’ve written plenty about my “one and done” rule and the exceptions to it. For reasons of practicality I like to diversify and not read too many authors twice. The writer has to be notable for me to read them multiple times. I have broken that rule probably fifty times, but for the most part I stick to it..
I also tend to be a morning reader. The romantic image of turning a few pages before turning in has never materialized in my schedule. I’m too tired by the end of the day, and too filled with thoughts, to concentrate. So reading is typically accompanied by a morning cup of coffee.
Third rule: I finish books. DNF is a tough settlement for me and one I rarely negotiate. I have slogged through some terrible books. One novel I picked up read like Sleeping With The Enemy fanfiction. I finished a tediously pretentious memoir by Debra Winger and a short story in which a woman cooked semen. I’d like to think that I’m getting a stamp in a passport by hitting the final credits.
This year for the first time I am playing around with a new rule. Maybe it’s more a book challenge than a rule. However, after noticing an especially high number of big books on my TBR pile, I decided to do some reading by size.
The plan is simple: for every long book I finish this year, I will then read a few very short ones. This may turn 2023 into the year of long and short. We’ll see.
Last week I wrote about the very long A Little Life. At over seven hundred pages, it really should count as two reads. On the flip side, here are three very short books I have read since finishing that tome. I’d like to think the axis is balanced again.
1.
This is a lovely short novel about two families who come together for a rehearsal dinner in a garden of the childhood home of the groom’s father. Pinder is writing a cookbook about Mesopotamian food and is considering, as the novel opens, making pigeon pie for the twenty-four expected guests. His daughter, Sara, likes to sit on roofs. His other daughter, Naomi, is just back from a job at an orphanage in Budapest. His son, Adam, is marrying a woman named Eliza the next morning. All of the characters are distinct and a bit quirky. There is cultural tension, a budding romance, and a mysterious guest. High points for botanical trivia.
2.
This is a short essay by a Nigerian author and feminist. I enjoyed seeing the topic through her eyes. A good choice for International Women’s Day on March 8th.
3.
The author is the product of a nineteen-year-old bisexual and a Texas preacher with another family. She is raised mainly by her grandparents, a banking heiress who is going broke and a Brit who regales his granddaughter with stories of his impoverished London boyhood. Somehow they all end up on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. The memoir is mainly about her grandparents’ childhood memories as told to their granddaughter. Her hardscrabble grandad and high society grandmother are a peculiar match but offer a grounded sense of family. This is a strange book that fits into a series of short memoirs about the author’s unusual life. In the next, The Kiss, her father appears.
Books Smitten 