With all of the books I have read in my life, I have never regretted reading one because of its physical size.

Until now.

The first book of 2011 was John Grisham’s “The Last Juror,” a story about a young guy who buys a newspaper in a small Southern town where a horrifying murder happens. From the title you can probably get that the resulting trial is a big part of the story.

What isn’t big is the book itself — its 486 pages are contained in a roughly 4×7 inch paperback package. As the last book of a year, this wouldn’t be a problem. I’m not an engineer, but if the towers of books I built during past years are any indication, I could have some issues down the road:

The 2009 stack

The potentially disastrous base of 2011

The book itself is what you would expect from a multi-best-selling mystery/thriller author who basically has his own shelf at Barnes & Noble. Since this one involved a main character running a weekly newspaper, I was able to connect with some of the “slower” portions of the story.

I couldn’t help but laugh at some of the journalistic standards the newspaper editor, Willy, held himself too. Basically if he thought what he was saying could be right, and he wanted that to be the truth, he went with it.

The main crime involves the rape and murder of a mother with two small children who were in the house at the time. Relying on an unnamed source, Willy described the house and “estimated that the children’s beds were about thirty feet from their mother’s.”

He goes on to write that “experts” say it is unlikely the children would testify at trial — his expert being one of the reporters at his newspaper. I’m not saying this kind of thing doesn’t happen all the time, but it’s certainly not what we learn at journalism school.

Writing for a weekly newspaper can be very different from a news outlet with daily deadlines. If you cover something five days before the story has to be written, there isn’t the same energy and pressure to write your piece right away.

The man accused of the mother’s murder (who is arrested in the first chapter — no spoilers) goes on trial and the jury reaches a verdict. Even though he has several days before his deadline, Willy goes directly to his office and begins “typing with a fury” in order to capture the moment.

When I was in college, I wrote for our weekly newspaper, which had a Thursday afternoon deadline. I covered mostly sports, which involved going to a lot of basketball and volleyball games on Saturdays and Tuesdays. At first, I rarely wrote about the Saturday games right after they happened because I had so much time and more fun things to do those nights.

But then I discovered how much better the stories were when I captured them rather than interpreting them through my notes. There was a different energy to walking directly back to my dorm, sitting down at my desk and writing about the game without having to rely on what I had scribbled down.

Because of the genre, I don’t want to say anything more about the story. It’s not a physically solid book for foundation purposes, but storywise I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it.