Great Little Books

Great writing isn't measured by length. Brevity is a virtue. Don't use nine words when one will do.

That's not the message kids receive in school. (Are college term papers still graded by weight?)

Most long essays and books are blowhards at the dinner table. Few are worth the effort. Victor Hugo and Rabelais make the cut. Thomas Pynchon does, too, as I discovered when a copy of the 784-page "Gravity's Rainbow" turned up in the back seat during the long desert crossing from Colorado home to California one summer. The New Mexico sky was a perfect backdrop to the tale of Hilter's secret rocketry program.

When a master does decide to run long, he has his reasons. Forced to choose, I would take Bach's B minor mass over the Inventions, Beethoven's Eroica over the Bagatelles.

Even then, length doesn't necessarily equate with depth. Les Cing Doigts, Stravinsky's collection of eight very, very short pieces for piano, is for me among the most haunting works in all of music. I'd take those over The Rite of Spring.

Because I admire them so, I have a special place on my shelf for great little books. Here are five:
Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House. The great author of Bonfire of the Vanities explains why all those boxy buildings went up, and why we rightfully hate them. 111 pages.

Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy, the State. The primary intention of the state, Nock writes, is "to enable the economic exploitation of one class by another." Published in 1935 book, Our Enemy distills the argument for political liberality even better than Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, itself a great and highly influential little work. 109 pages.

Igor Stravinsky, The Poetics of Music. Delivered as a series of lectures in Harvard in 1939-40 by the giant of 20th-century music. 160 pages.

Genevieve Antoine Dariaux, A Guide to Elegance: For Every Woman Who Wants to be Well and Properly Dressed on All Occasions. An entrepreneurial Frenchwoman who became directress of the Nina Ricci salons, Mme. Dariaux's 1964 A-Z of fashion is a little dated, but still is worth more than all the back issues of Vogue and Bazaar together. 222 pages.

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49. I skimmed this 1965 Pynchon bagatelle after reading "Gravity's Rainbow" many years ago, and had forgotten it so completely that I couldn't remember what the title signified. I revisited it this summer after the having my socks blown off by Pynchon's newest, Inherent Vice, a masterpiece in Los Angeles noir style set at the peak of hippie optimism. I'm listening now to the Audiobooks version of Against the Day, a 1,085-pager. Lot 49 is 152 pages.

Bonus: The best short story I read this year was "Broadway Financier," part of the "Guys and Dolls and Other Writings" collection of Damon Runyon. I'll bet the insights of the chorus girl Silk outdo 90 percent of the counsel available at any high-net-worth investment house or private bank.