Last fall, I decided that I would try to read a book every single day for the next year. Supposedly, Winston Churchill got through at least one book every day of his adult life, and I had always envied him. But I saw no way that I could equal his feat unless I stuck to short books.
So one day last October, I began visiting my library and borrowing books that I could read in less than two hours. They were all novels, novellas or collections of short stories; I read non-fiction only if somebody pays me. Mostly, I grabbed any slim volume that looked interesting without paying much attention to the subject matter. However, if I got home and found that I had borrowed an experimental novel or a book about a recently divorced woman who comes to a small New England town to start a new life and immediately strikes up a friendship with a quirky local, I took it back.
If a book had a glowing comment on the back by John Updike – one of the few critics whose judgment I trust – I borrowed it. I also read 30 of my own books, a couple dozen sent to me by my publisher, 25 that I borrowed from the Center for Fiction in Manhattan, and a few that I found in the trash. Only a handful were fewer than 100 pages long; most logged in right around 150; only a few ran longer than 200 pages.
I kept right on schedule until February, when I flew to Sweden to do a BBC radio program about the rise of Scandinavian noir. As so often happens when one’s rhythm is interrupted, I started falling off the pace, and by April I was too far behind to catch up. So I threw in the towel. This year, I may end up reading 250 books, but I will not get anywhere near my original target. Not unless I cheat by speed-reading, which I will not do. Speed-reading is for slobs.
It no longer matters to me that I will not be able to read a book every day, because my decision to focus exclusively on short books has proved to be so exhilarating. Since the exercise got under way, I have read classics such as Paul Gallico’s The Snow Goose, Robert Nathan’s Portrait of Jenny and Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees, three jewel-like novels by Penelope Fitzgerald (Offshore, The Book Shop and Human Voices), and Joyce Carol Oates’s haunting Black Water, in which she imagines Chappaquiddick from the point of view of the drowning victim. I also read three novels by Alberto Moravia, two by Nadine Gordimer and collections of stories by Lorrie Moore, Susan Minot and Truman Capote, as well as Capote’s first novel, Summer Crossing. Not to mention The Roman Summer of Mrs. Stone, Tennessee Williams’s bleak first novel, and Wallace Stegner’s debut effort, Remembering Laughter, which was part of a first-novel competition held by Little, Brown in 1937. (The cover announces that Stegner is the winner.)
I have delved into famous authors I had never tried before, including Carlos Fuentes (Aura, The Old Gringo), Naguib Mahfouz (Before the Throne), Jamaica Kincaid (Lucy) and John Berger, whose beautiful novel From A to X is a series of letters presented out of order that chronicle the love affair between a political prisoner in an African prison and the woman who dreams of his release.
My adventure has taken me many places I never expected to go. Because I picked books at random, I have read short novels by writers from Iceland, China, Thailand, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Argentina, Belgium and Israel. They dealt with everything from a woodcutter who stays behind when the Nazis close in on his Finnish village in 1941 to the plight of Thai cross-dressers during religious festival season. There were books about Turkish kleptomaniacs, English survivors of the bombing of Coventry and a Mexican transvestite hairdresser who converts his beauty salon into a hospice for AIDS victims. Several were extraordinary – Tokyo Fiancée by Amélie Nothomb, The Maytrees by Annie Dillard, Running by Jean Echenoz, Grief by Andrew Holleran. I loved these books. They were in my life for only a day – two days at most – but that made those days special. Reading longer books, no matter how good they are, can turn into a chore. Reading Moll Flanders is hard work. Reading Germinal is drudgery. Reading these 250 tiny volumes was never drudgery.
