By Jeffrey Wasserstrom

Many rituals have had to be cancelled or at least radically altered lately. Because of this, I take comfort in one of my fall ones proceeding in exactly its usual way. This is possible because the ritual in question, which is associated with my love-hate relationship with annual “books of the year” lists, involves activities that are solo endeavors and easy to carry out while sheltering in place. Every year, from late November until mid-December, I devour all the best book lists I can find online. And, just as regularly, I fixate on one aspect of them that annoys me. In 2020, as in previous years, I’ve enjoyed learning what various periodicals I respect and various authors I admire have to say about all sorts of books, a few of which I’ve read and more of which I think I might want to read. And, again per usual, as I read the lists, I mutter under my breath about a pet peeve.

More than once in the past the source of annoyance I’ve obsessed about has been that I need to go through a lot of lists before seeing the title of any book I might have considered offering up as a choice myself. In 2020, however, I don’t have that complaint. Amy Stanley’s Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World, a magical non-fiction work that uses varied sources to conjure up a distant time and place, has showed up on several lists, including the very first one I read this year, the one in the New Statesman.

Another recurring source of frustration in the past, which I will mention here even at the risk of coming across as petty and self-involved, has been that none of the periodicals for which I write reviews has asked me to contribute to their annual wrap up. I retired this complaint a few years ago when the wonderful Italian magazine Internazionale was putting together a special “Playlist” issue, devoted to the best works of the year to read, listen to, or watch and asked me to describe my three favorite recently published books on China, the country I teach and write about for a living. The next year, they even asked me to do the same thing. Last year, though, I brought that old grievance out of retirement, stating it in an altered form. I don’t read Italian, so my complaint became that no periodical in a language I can read has ever asked me for book of the year picks.

What is my special grievance this year? It’s a novel one about novellas—and novella-length non-fiction works. I love short books, but aside from the special cases of poetry collections and children’s books, very few of them have been showing up on any of the 2020 lists I’ve seen.

Please don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against medium-sized books. Stranger in the Shogun’s City is one, as it is 305 pages including notes and index. And I have read and liked a lot of other books this year that are roughly similar to it in length, including three that hit a particular sweet spot for me, as they are engagingly written but learned books that are about China but also have a global angle: Anne Gerritsen’s The City of Blue and White: Chinese Porcelain and the Early Modern World (348 pages), James Carter’s Champions Days: The End of Old Shanghai (352 pages), and Kelly Hammond’s China’s Muslims and Japan’s Empire: Centering Islam in World War II (314 pages).

I also have nothing against long books—even really long ones. One hill I’m prepared to die on is that the best history book published in the 1960s, and one of the best ever published, was E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, and it’s well over 800 pages. In addition, two novels I finally got around to reading in 2019, and in each was very happy I did, were The Overstory by Richard Powers, a hefty work of 512 pages, and Vikram Seth’s gargantuan A Suitable Boy, which is longer than The Making of the English Working Class and The Overstory combined.

Still, many of the books I like are short. Some are very short, such as Robert MacFarlane’s The Gifts of Reading, which at 37 pages could be described as a pamphlet-like publication. In my own field, I love Jonathan Spence’s The Death of Woman Wang, which is just 192 pages long. In addition, one of my favorite books about Chinese literature, Sabina Knight’s Chinese Fiction: A Very Short Introduction, is even shorter (160 pages), and one of my favorite works of Chinese literature Lu Xun’s The Story of Ah Q, is shorter still (a bilingual edition of it runs to 160 pages).

If I compiled a big list of little books I admire, it would include many works that have nothing much in common aside from clocking in at under 250 pages. It would have varied works of non-fiction, such as Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman (176 pages), a work of history with elements of memoir woven in; Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (162 pages), a collection of marvelous short essays on the pleasures of the written word; Stephen Greenblatt’s Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics (210 pages), which revisited Tudor staged plays with Trump’s power plays in mind; and Miklos Haraszti’s The Velvet Prison: Artists Under State Socialism (165 pages), a slim volume about the Soviet bloc’s past that I find endlessly helpful in thinking about China’s present. On my list would also be short works of fiction that, for diverging reasons, made deep impressions on me as a teenager, ranging from James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (176 pages) to Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (217 pages) to Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Wizard of Earthsea (210 pages).

I’m not sure if fewer short books are making best of the year lists now than before, but this seems like a time when many more should be showing up on them. A lot of presses are publishing short book series. Social media has been shortening attention spans. And, at least for me, patterns of pandemic life have made it harder to concentrate on books (engrossing television series are a different matter) that go on and on. I’m also not taking the kinds of long plane flights that in the past sometimes provided me a chance to get through a big chunk of a big book.

I can see why list contributors steer clear of books under 250 pages—or at least makes sure to include one or two longer than that if they have, as I had with Internazionale, three slots to fill. To plump for only short books could suggest a lack of seriousness. I would not have had to worry on this score if Internazionale had asked me to name a trio of 2020 picks. One of my choices would have been Aftershock: Essays from Hong Kong, which is made up of eleven bracingly candid poignant personal takes on last year’s protests by journalists who covered them. It is just 100 pages long. My second choice, though, would have been the medium-length Stranger in the Shogun’s City. And my third choice would have been the gravitas-guaranteeing Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire, a magisterial work of 864 pages by Tim Harper.

Alas, no publication has asked me to name my books of 2020. Hope springs eternal, though, even in dark times, so I can fantasize about one of the periodicals to which I’ve contributed to in the past deciding that 2021 will be the year to ask me to be part of their end of the year feature. Or, failing that, maybe Internazionale will revive its now dormant “Playlist” special issue tradition and ask me again to suggest three books to their readers, and then, as in the past, translate my short explanations for choosing them into Italian.

If the magazine were to do that, I have no idea yet what trio of 2021 titles I would select. My guess is, however, that I would end up picking works that were of varying lengths and differed in other ways. And I have actually gotten advance copies of three forthcoming books, two of which I’ve read part of and one of which I’ve read all of, which I could imagine making a satisfying Internazionale bundle.

One of the books I am midway through, which I am finding a rollicking read, is Monkey King: Journey to the West, Julia Lovell’s new translation of a classic of Chinese fiction by Wu Cheng’en (384 pages). The other book I am midway through is a wonderful collection of short stories that are mostly set in China but also engage with the United States, Te-Ping Chen’s The Land of Big Numbers (256 pages). Last but not least is the book I have read all the way through already in galleys, which is also the shortest. (Those two facts may not be unrelated, as I referred to having attention span issues in this time of COVID.) That last book is a witty and informative one by Linda Jaivin whose very title telegraphs to readers that is anything but a doorstop of a volume. Called The Shortest History of China, it is 160 pages.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom teaches at U.C. Irvine and is the author of six books of varying lengths, the most recent of which is Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink, which was published by Columbia Global Reports earlier this year and is 112 pages long.