I have found, over the last few years, that my ability to read has declined. Not, I should explain, my ability to understand text, but my capacity to follow a narrative thread, exacerbated by non-sleeping infants, post-Covid brain fog. In addition to unconventional working hours, all of this ability has degraded to the extent that I would put a novel down, not manage to pick it up again for a week, and then have no knowledge of what I’d previously read.
In the search of something my fried brain could still enjoy, I picked up a slim paperback from a pile of Oxfam finds: a novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon, featuring Parisian detective Jules Maigret. Opening it, a leaflet fluttered to the ground, featuring a checklist of all 75 Maigret novels… and just like that, an idea formed to tackle my reading malaise. Simenon’s novels average 150 pages of terse prose, books which can be read in a couple
