Short Books Are Perfect for Our Distracted Age

When the news is one report of human suffering — or environmental degradation, or violation of democratic norms — after another, people might be forgiven for averting their eyes from the headlines in favor of getting a better night’s sleep. The only problem: In a democracy, tuning out means giving the foxes full run of the henhouse.

In recent years, I’ve been looking for a solution to this conundrum. How is it possible to be a well-informed citizen and simultaneously a calm, mostly cheerful, more or less sane human being?

The closest thing I’ve found to a workaround is the right dosing. I follow the news during daylight hours. At night, I read a book.

Sometimes it’s a poetry collection I can finish in an evening. Sometimes it’s a memoir or a thick, juicy novel that will carry me through a week or two. Often it’s an essay collection, a genre which comes with those lovely, built-in stopping places that make it easier to close the book and avert a wrestling match with the clock.

But more and more I find myself picking up a novella or a short novel, something I can read in full on a rainy Sunday afternoon or in the lamplight hours between supper and bedtime. This has nothing to do with any kind of reading log or yearly numbers goal. I am not an ambitious reader. I am a slow reader, and that’s a serious liability for someone who loves books and is running out of years.

I attribute my plodding ways to having spent four years studying Latin, an inflected language that requires reading one word at a time, “not eyeful by eyeful,” as my Latin professor was fond of saying. I long ago lost my ability to read Latin, but I still read word by word, a habit I formed when time felt limitless. I can hardly imagine that feeling now.