I Wish It Had Been 30% Shorter

Seven books in June and July, about two and a half thousand pages, and when I went back through what I'd written about each of them I noticed I keep making the same complaint. Not about subject matter, not about the writing. About length. Three of these books I'd hand to anyone. The other four all lost me somewhere in the middle, and in every single case the problem was that they kept going.

June was the good month, so let's start there.

June

A Prisoner of Birth by Jeffrey Archer got me first and it got me for 624 pages. A man is framed for murder and claws his way out of an impossible trap through sheer luck and by being just a bit too good to be true. I'm staying vague because the plot is the whole point and spoiling it would be rude. It passed the time. That is genuinely the nicest thing I can say - I was bored for significant stretches and I was relieved when it ended, which is a strange feeling to have about a book you technically enjoyed.

Then Kindred. Octavia Butler drops a young Black woman back in time and forces her to live through what her ancestors lived through, and I could not put it down. I grew up in Europe, which means I have almost none of the historical grounding an American reader brings to this, and Butler simply carried me there anyway. It cost something to read. I finished it in four days and needed a minute afterwards.

Toronto Book of the Dead by Shawn Micallef and Adam Bunch is the twin of Adam Bunch's Toronto Book of Love, which I read last summer on a podcast recommendation and expected nothing from and then loved. Between them they tell the story of this city and this country in a way that made me understand the place I now live. That sounds like a small thing. It isn't - I've been here long enough to have opinions about Toronto and not nearly long enough to have earned them, and this book filled in a lot of the why. The people in it changed the ground I walk on.

Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova is about loss and denial and love, and I'm not going to describe it further because describing it would flatten it. It's unlike anything else I read this year. Read it cold.

Bon Voyage Mr. President and Other Stories closed out the month, and this is where the pattern I mentioned turns around and bites from the other direction. Sixty-four pages of García Márquez, beautifully written, and some of the shorts are genuinely magic while others left me puzzled and unsatisfied in a way I couldn't resolve by rereading them. Too short to land, where everything else this summer was too long to hold.

July

July was two books and both of them were Newfoundland, which I did not plan.

The Colony of Unrequited Dreams by Wayne Johnston is the story of the man whose signature made Newfoundland part of Canada. Most of what happens in it actually happened, and the way Johnston writes Newfoundlanders and their land through the eyes of the premier who changed both is close to poetry. For about half the book I thought I was reading a five. Then the politics take over, the descriptions get longer and then longer again, and I spent the back half dragging myself through it page by page. Cut a third and it's one of the best things I've read all year. As it stands I was mostly relieved to be done, which is exactly the same sentence I wrote about Jeffrey Archer six weeks earlier and I don't love what that says about me.

Sorry, Not Sorry by Mark Critch is the other one. Critch is a comedian, he's from St. John's, and the book is about how Canada ended up like this - the cultural quirks, the small absurdities, why everything here is more complicated than it looks from outside. It's funny in places and I learned things from it. It's also forced in places, and once I noticed the forcing I couldn't stop noticing it. Comedians writing books have a specific failure mode where you can hear them waiting for the laugh.

Cut a third

Here's what I actually take from two months of this. Every book that disappointed me had a version of itself that would have been excellent, and that version was shorter. Archer at 400 pages. Johnston at 380. Critch with half the jokes and all of the history. Meanwhile the three that landed sit between 287 and 424 pages, which is not a rule so much as an observation I can't stop making now that I've made it once.

I don't think this is books getting worse. I think it's me. Somewhere in the last year my patience for a book that's still setting things up on page 300 quietly ran out, and I've started resenting the padding in a way I never used to. There are four books on my abandoned shelf from this year alone and one of them is War and Peace, so make of that what you will.

All of it lives on my shelf, abandonments included. Currently open: Meditations, a Ryan Holiday, a Canadian politics textbook I started in May, Canadian history for dummies that I started in February, and a Louise Penny I picked up last week. Five books at once. Meditations and the Penny are the ones I'm actually reading.