On Short Books

 Last week I talked about my mixed feelings towards big books. For some reason blogspot gave it a content warning. I’m not sure why this would be, I didn’t say very much shocking. I talked about big books and how I often find them too big for their own good. I used a fair amount of eating imagery I suppose, about nibbling some books and guzzling others.. but that can’t be the problem.

This is especially perplexing because I have tackled some generally taboo subjects on this blog. I’ve reviewed Fanny Hill, books about eighteenth century sexuality and any number of peculiar gothic novels and amatory tales with all sorts of odd stuff. In my review for The Manuscript Found in Saragossa I talk about a “incestuous, diabolic, necrophiliac, gay threesome” and recieved nothing. I’ve even re-uploaded the big books host and things seem fine. All very perplexing.

I thought that I’d talk about shorter books this week, if I can get away with it.

Some of my utter favourite books of the last few years have been on the short side. The Colour Purple was a particular highlight. I think it’s amazing that something so short can be so epic in scope, taking place over many years and featuring a whole community whose many characters change radically throughout. At the beginning of the story, Celie is a nobody among nobodies, her opinions are unwanted and her desires unrecognised. By the end, she is the centre of a rambunctious group of people who have been built up, knocked down and rebuilt again. If Proust’s In Search of Lost Time takes over a million words to create a society and show it change, The Colour Purple does it in sixty-six thousand - and more vividly too.

One of my utter favourite books is only eighty-thousand words. It’s Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and it’s my go-to recommendation for anyone who hasn’t read it. It doesn’t have the epic sweep of The Colour Purple, it technically takes place during the time one sentence is read out. The story itself barely leaves the confines of one hall, where people dance for hours and hours with barely a break. I read it in one huge gulp, utterly addicted. It’s not a cheerful read but the desperation and tension of it are close to unbearable.

Patrick Hamilton is one of my favourite writers, who mainly wrote mid-length to long-ish novels. My favourite is The Slaves of Solitude but coming close second is Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, which is actually a trilogy of short novels. The best of those is the shortest, The Siege of Pleasure. It takes place over twenty-four hours, most of them increasingly drunken. One of the fascinating elements is how it takes the character of the first book, Ella, puts her as the central character, charts her every move and shows her to be even more empty than she seemed in the first book.

If you asked me my favourite author during university, I’d have easily answered Kurt Vonnegut. There’s an author who can slide in, lob a load of interesting stuff at a reader and get out before he wears out his welcome. I re-read those books so many times, but I don’t think I’d have appreciated a blockbuster length Vonnegut novel, it would have become tiresome.

Even my beloved eighteenth century isn’t all big bulky beasts. A lot of the Grub Street stuff was very short, some barely longer than pamphlets but even the heavyweights of the time produced pocketable works. Johnson’s Rambler essays have been packaged into three very carryable volumes - and if that’s cheating, his novel Rasselas is a tiddler. Yet, within that short novel you find a distinct summation of many of Johnson’s themes, an understanding into how he saw the world and a few pretty decent little jokes. I always recommend Rasselas to Johnson neophytes. Goldsmith’s novel The Vicar of Wakefield is also a fairly short work, eminently readable and rammed with charm. 

My favourite short eighteenth century work is Jane Collier’s An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting, a wickedly funny parody of self-improvement literature designed to help the reader become more unpleasant. And the best thing about a short book, you can read it many times over.

Dear reader, do not worry, I won’t be talking about medium sized books next week, I’ll be looking at London Street cries.