"Slim" volumes, if they're scholarly, can still take a long time to read. Some of the essays that appear in scholarly journals will typically be only 20-30 pages, and they can take quite a while to slog through. I haven't ready any Sontag, though. I don't know if this is the case with her. The hardest I've found to read: Eve Sedgewick and Judith Butler. Be sure to have a dictionary handy when you read anything by these two. Whole debates are spawned around Butler and her insistence of compressing her thoughts into the most hide-bound complicated scholarly jargon she can manage. (This would be the exact opposite of anything George Dubya might manage to scribble).

SRS