in response to We Have Stopped Reading Long Things, and This Is a Long Thing About It

Page Forty

2 points · November 2026

The long piece about long things asked what page forty was for me. I want to answer it at length, since that seems to be the rule.

Page forty was a novel I was made to read at school and hated for thirty-nine pages with the particular hatred of a fifteen-year-old who has been told something is good. It was slow. It was about a house. Nothing happened, and the nothing was described in sentences that went on past the point where a sentence should stop and then kept going, and I read them with my eyes and not with anything else.

On page forty a character I had not been paying attention to said a thing about the house that was also, I realised with a jolt I can still feel, a thing about me. About my house. About the particular silence of a house in which two people are being quiet at each other. I had not known there was a word for that silence. There was not, exactly; there was a sentence, and the sentence was on page forty, and I had nearly not got there.

I finished it. I have read it four times since. I would not have got past page ten on a screen.

So that is my page forty, and here is my worry about the piece: it assumes there is a page forty in everything, and there is not. Most long things are long because nobody stopped them. The reader who bails at page four is usually right. The practice the piece describes — read to the end regardless — is a practice for finding the rare page forty at the cost of many, many page tens, and I am no longer sure the trade is good. I did it at fifteen because I was made to. I am not sure I would do it now for anything I chose.