In Praise of Small Things, Like These

This month I am only reading short books

The literary agent Molly Ker Hawn tweeted on March 12th: 

I'm just a literary agent, standing in front of aspiring children's authors, asking you to write shorter books. 

The sentiment was echoed in several quarters and you can read some of the responses on this thread:

Jo Clarke @bookloverJo

I'm just a school librarian, standing in front of children's authors, asking you to write shorter books

Molly Ker Hawn @mollykh

I'm just a literary agent, standing front of aspiring children's authors, asking you to write shorter books

This isn’t a new discussion. But in publishing a point has to be raised hundreds of times by hordes of folk in every corner of the industry before the thing even begins to takes hold. Anyone who spends time reading current upper-primary and young adult fiction and compares the word counts with the fiction of yore will wonder why we’re still not providing a decent crop of quicker reads for today’s youth – especially as we also keep commenting on their stolen focus. 

(I raise my hypocritical hand at this point to confess that my middle-grade books are either 60k or 50k words long. Bad author.)

I have my own appetite for shorter reads at the moment. Having initially loved and later endured Ian McEwan’s Lessons in February (called “old-fashioned, digressive and indulgently long” by Beejay Silcox in The Guardian), I’m having a month of seeking out or remembering intense, concise books. Books that aren’t a bit like listening to your dogmatic uncle at a family gathering on a too-hot day as he tells you all of his opinions from the moment of his conception until now, but more like your eccentric aunt breezing past, sloshing gin on her shoes as she relays an outrageous anecdote, giving an acerbic piece of advice and poking the elderly uncle in the eye before she vanishes.