Running my fingers over the light layer of dust that sits atop the row of chunky novels on my bookshelf, I can’t help but wonder if they truly do have that mythological strength to stopper my door. Physically heavy, these books are intimidating both in weight and length – translating to a fear of heavy content itself. Although readers tend to have their preferences of genre, style, and size, there has been a marked trend towards the consumption of less muscular books, perhaps for this very reason.
Books have always been a commodity, but recently reading has fallen into a commodification of its own as we attempt to market and define ourselves through this hobby on social media. Striving to be like the inimitable characters we see on TV, we fashion ourselves as Rory Gilmore, Jo March, and Hermione Granger, understatedly smart and well-read with piles of attractively cultured books heaped on our floors.
The shelves of contemporary bookstores are lined with compact fiction from the likes of Sally Rooney, Akwaeke Emezi, and a multitude of Japanese and Korean authors. Resembling leaflets, they are often hardly bigger than the university welcome guides and definitely more convenient to carry, perfectly conforming to the philosophy of books as accessories. While making an effort to read more is admirable, this ambition for higher reading quantity can be at the expense of the enjoyment of reading. We are told from many angles to pick up the short books and boost our numbers, either for personal validation or to get ahead of others. The Goodreads platform particularly promotes its yearly reading challenge by publishing listicles of short books to reach your goal. Are the big books being abandoned?
Before I answer this question, it is my sworn duty to give them some love.
Their size may be inconvenient and tiring for the hands, but nothing compares to getting lost in books as wide as bricks, or spending hours and days and months in the same world and finally, when it’s all over, grieving over its loss. You might never feel the same way about a book again. That’s certainly how I felt after finishing The Priory of the Orange Tree. Mainly found in the genres of Classics, Non-fiction and Fantasy, doorstoppers can seem not just daunting, but insurmountable. Mammoths such as the Russian classics are especially intimidating, what with their seemingly interchangeable names, characters and general TMI on agriculture and freemasonry. Happily, they are not untameable – though daunting still. While it may take longer to immerse oneself, longer books tend to nurture more development of worlds and characters, ultimately deepening the reader’s attachment to the story. Rather than brief thematic explorations, they can make for more fulfilling reading experiences – to which there are, of course, exceptions (making it all the more egregious if they fail to live up to expectations). This fear of disappointment seems to drive readers away from longer books, as the time spent can end up being monumentally wasted, denoting the priceless nature of our free time.
The daily grind of contemporary capitalist life leaves most exhausted and with little spare time for stimulating activities and hobbies of the mind, leading to more selectivity on that time and less patience for more time-consuming pursuits. Another benefit of long books is that they train your attention span, something that has shortened universally. Although there is no evidence to suggest a greater consumption of big books in the past – rather, with higher rates of literacy, it should be higher now – they are currently competing with shorter and less demanding modes of consumption like streaming, social media, and even shorter literature. (But in the kiss, marry, kill of literature, I’d have to marry the doorstopper, or else it’d slam shut.)
[Leah Hart, she/her]
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