With nearly 4 months stretching lazily ahead, Summer 2025 began with a long list of books I itched to dive into. I was excited to spend sunny afternoons on the beach with Virginia Woolf and rainy evenings on the couch with James Baldwin. I was going to read classics, philosophy, and poetry; I would read the stories I’d been gifted by friends and those that I had bought myself and never cracked open.
Maybe I should have predicted this, but I ultimately did not reach the end of my list. By September, I was stranded somewhere in the middle of Emma, where the plot seemed to have fallen to a standstill. Instead of reading, I spent hours each day scrolling on TikTok and feeling like I was waiting for something, but unable to identify what.
In the couple days of reacclimating to town before this semester’s inception, I did discover something. Browsing the shelves of Toppings, I stopped at a turning shelf of short stories and essays between the poetry and cookbooks. The shelf was filled with small paperbacks: White Nights, The Yellow Wallpaper, The Communist Manifesto, A Room of One’s Own. I left with a few short books, including one of Gertrude Stein’s experimental prose.
That night, I sat down and dedicated myself to finishing a couple of Stein’s short stories. The texts gave me a taste of her literary innovation with their pounding words and cycling phrases. The stories, though unusual in their rhythm and repetition, were perplexing to interpret and to consider in comparison with more standard literature. I enjoyed the near-instant gratification they gave me and, after some reading about the author online, learned some fascinating Parisian and Pennsylvanian history. In this way, I found simple satisfaction and space in a literary world I may not have stumbled into had I not thought to trade, at least for the moment, the full-length book for more of its smaller counterparts. Reading ‘small’ meant I had the freedom to read whatever I had even the slightest desire to at any moment. It has allowed me to experience a greater range of thought in half the time. More authors, more styles, the same reel-ruined attention span. Thus, I began my short-story journey: my new low-investment, high-reward pastime.
The ‘short read,’ whether an essay, a Substack, a newspaper article, a short story, a poem, or a small book, can be an easy way to become immersed in a story without having to commit much time. I’ve realised this can be a great strategy to keep reading during semester time, and prevent the monotony of dragging out the same book for months. Having recently decided that the back rooms of Toppings will be my study-break haven, I intend to pick up more short stories soon- or even venture into the essay genre if I’m feeling adventurous. Though in academics a short story is inevitably going to appear at least once in a coursework load, in my experience, the disturbing classics such as ‘The Landlady’, ‘The Lottery’, ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, ‘The Piano Teacher’, and ‘Ms. Brill tends to be over-represented in the classroom. In reality, the genre is much more vast, and I would encourage exploration into the world of the ‘short read’.