What's good in nonfiction

 One of the first lines I learned to read in ancient Greek was “Big book, big evil.”

The speaker was Callimachus, a librarian at Alexandria. One explanation is that scrolls in ceramic jars weighed a ton, and organizing the stacks was a bit like hitting the gym.

But my professor was pretty sure Callimachus was just making a point about brevity. Ancient books tended to be shorter. It was assumed most topics could be covered in a short book.

I mentioned reading Pico Iyer’s The Art of Stillness, a TED Book, published by Simon & Schuster. I’d guess it’s about 15,000 words. Most novels are five times that long.

Iyer’s book has about 80 pages, including 18 pages of photographs by Eydís Einarsdóttir. Iyer said it was written to be read in one sitting.

I’m a fan of Very Short Introductions, a series published by Oxford University Press. I loved the old Pelican paperbacks that provided introductions to subjects and the Modern Masters series. 

Brevity is a good thing, and I wish publishers of novels agreed. Some seem to think that no one would buy a short novel. That’s an idea, I suppose, but I can barely grasp it.