It's occasionally interesting to stop and take stock of what I'm reading, and why. These days my time gets sliced into thinner and thinner pieces, so my attention gets similarly subdivided. I find I'm increasingly interested in the short story and the essay, because I can read one in its entirety in the blocks of time I tend to have during the day—a half-hour-long commute downtown, a half hour of spare time before bed, or my lunch break.
Lately, I'm also drawn to the burgeoning phenomenon of so-called "flash" fiction, works that are even shorter than the traditional story; there are so many names for this (in addition to "flash" fiction, there's "fast" fiction, "sudden" fiction, "smoke" stories, "palm of the hand" stories, and so on) that it can be hard to keep track. In any case, the Internet has clearly provided fertile ground for this length of work, as it's ideally suited to, say, a blog post, or a single web page/article in an online magazine. You don't have to look hard to find examples; Google is your friend, or check out what I'm reading these days.
Now, it's true that not needing to "hold on" to the "state" of character development and plot in a longer work like a novel is a bit less taxing on my stress-addled, sleep-deprived brain; but that's not the only factor that attracts me to these formats. In the slightly longer (one-to-two-thousand-word) range, there's just enough room for something interesting to happen, but not much room for dilly-dallying, and I'm enjoying seeing how authors negotiate that particular limitation. Also, when I'm only able to read really little slices at a time—days when I have a shorter commute, or I'm just too tired to focus for longer than ten or fifteen minutes are unfortunately becoming more common—I frankly get bored with many novel-length works before I have the chance to finish them. Very few authors are gripping or compelling enough to keep me interested in the story line for the amount of calendar time that would have to elapse before I could finish a sizeable novel.
If I only read suspense thrillers that kept me turning every page, I'd be all set; and it's true, every once in a while I do find a novel that keeps me in its clutches the whole way through. The most recent example of that would be William Gibson's Cyberpunk and Bridge groups of novels, which I read in their entirety in several long sittings a couple of years ago. But I tend to prefer the serious stuff: the genre usually referred to as "literary" fiction (as if there could be fiction that weren't literary), which, in novel form at least, tends to move more slowly, and for which I just wouldn't have the patience over the several weeks it would take me to finish a decent chunk.
Last thing: there's something unique to a particular Canadian genre of short story that I dearly love, and that I don't get from other sources. It's what has made stuff like Best Canadian Stories and Coming Attractions, or the Journey Prize Anthology, my absolute favourite things to read for many years now, but I'm not sure what to call it. Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, Norman Levine... there's a long list. Something about Canadian contemporary short fiction's no-foolin' starkness and sensory realism appeals to me on a gut level. To be sure, Americans have it too, and I'll happily devour the various available anthologies (Pushcart, Best American, etc.), but to me the Canadian stuff feels like home.