tl; dr

My nominee for this year’s Too Long: Don’t Read award…

This autumn, according to the newspaper Libération, 676 new books will be published [in France], 466 of them written in French, the rest long-awaited translations. According to François Reynaert in Le Nouvel Observateur, “The name alone is leaden – in the expression ‘rentrée littéraire,’ one hears especially ‘rentrée.’ It smells of the back of the classroom and the old eraser.”

One novel, “Zone,” by Mathias Enard, consists of one sentence running over 500 pages.

Pass.