BOOKS BOUGHT:

• Dickens Dictionary—Alexander J. Philip
• Half a Life—Darin Strauss
• The Anthologist—Nicholson Baker
• The Million Dollar Mermaid­—Esther Williams

BOOKS READ:

• Our Mutual Friend—Charles Dickens
• The Uncoupling—Meg Wolitzer
• Let the Great World Spin—Colum McCann
• Half a Life—Darin Strauss

The advantages and benefits of writing a monthly column about reading for the Believer are innumerable, if predictable: fame, women (it’s amazing what people will do to get early information about the “Books Bought” list), international influence, and so on. But perhaps the biggest perk of all, one that has only emerged slowly, over the years, is this: you can’t read long books. Well, I can’t, anyway. I probably read between two and three hundred pages, I’m guessing, during the average working week, and I have the impression—please correct me if I’m wrong—that if you saw only one book in the “Books Read” list at the top there, it would be very hard to persuade you to plough through what would, in effect, be a two-thousand-word book review. And as a consequence, there are all sorts of intimidating-looking eight-hundred-pagers that I feel completely justified in overlooking. I am ignoring them for your benefit, effectively, although it would be disingenuous to claim that I spend my month resenting you. On the contrary, there have been times when, watching friends or fellow passengers struggling through some au courant literary monster, I have wanted to kiss you. I once gave a whole column over to David Copperfield, I remember, and more recently I raced through David Kynaston’s brilliant but Rubenesque Austerity Britain. For the most part, though, there’s a “Stuff I’ve Been Reading”–induced ­five-hundred-page cutoff.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should add that I am a literary fattist anyway; I have had a resistance to the more amply proportioned book all my adult life, which is why the thesis I’m most likely to write is entitled “The Shortest Book by Authors Who Usually Go Long.” The Crying of Lot 49, Silas Marner, ­A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man… I’ve read ’em all. You can ­infer from that lot what I haven’t read. And in any case, long, slow books can have a disastrous, demoralizing effect on your cultural life if you have young children and your reading time is short. You make only tiny inroads into the chunky white wastes every night before falling asleep, and before long you become convinced that it’s not really worth reading again until your children are in reform school. My advice, as someone who...