Robert Louis Stevenson, used to say: ”
“If there is anywhere a thing said in two sentences that could have been as clearly and engagingly said in one, then it’s amateur work.”
And indeed most books (fiction and non fiction) from the 20th century were rather short and on point. Sure there are some outliers but most classics are something like 200 to 300 pages long which should be a perfectly sifficient lenght to tell a story.
Yet in the 21st century books have become longer and longer – packed with so much unnecessary stuff that could have been shortened by good editing without losing much of the content.
Obamas biography is 768 pages long and quite tiresome. It could and should be easily 1/3 shoter.
Similarily the new hype books the fourth wing has over 500 and the iron flame over 600 pages.
Such lenght is rarely necessary. Authors just pack into their books so many unnecessary elements and as a result many great books are dragged down because of too much repetition, too many unnecessary story elements etc.
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by Tiredworker27
43 Comments
i like long books
one of my all time favorites is the stand by stephen king. 1,152 pages.
The longer the better, imo
every crime/thriller has to be at least 400 pages these days (or decades) while all the classics are around 200. it’s even more noticable if the author’s been around for a while. ed mcbain’s (my absolute favorite) early 87th precinct books from the 50s and 60s are around 150-200 pages but by the end in the early 2000s they were twice as long. and the weird thing is, they didn’t feel any longer. no unnecessary stuff, why does he keep banging on about this or that, they flew by just as fast. I guess that’s the sign of a good writer. he died almost 20 years ago and is greatly missed.
I disagree. The longer the better. I love doorstoppers. 200 pages is barely a pamphlet.
Is that actually true, though? LOTR and Gormenghast are long as fuck, as are Dickens books, Count of Monte Cristo, Divine Comedy…
In fact, most agents these days set pretty strict word count limits for first time submissions, so it doesn’t really seem like a true premise that books are becoming longer, you might just be reading long books in a row.
I just clicked through a list of best classic books and the majority were not in your 200-300 page range.
*(laughs in James Michener)*
Eh, everyone’s going to have different limits and nothing about that quote suggests a book must be short. It could just be a book 800 pages long where each sentence is meaningful and conveys something new. Also, who cares about efficiency in reading? Its not like I have some quota of books I must read per month or year. One of the reasons to read is escapism and a bigger book will get you lost in its world for longer.
Books and open world games. Sometimes less is more.
If you don’t like it, don’t read it. You obviously aren’t the target audience.
I find it interesting that you claim the opposite of what I feel. I am often bemoaning that all books are getting shorter and shorter, series being capped at trilogies and barely getting into depth.
Then again, I’m the freak that rereads book series with twenty entries in them haha
If you track actual trends, you’ll see that books are becoming shorter, not longer, because publishers are trying to meet the decreased attention spans of readers.
Also, page count isn’t a valid indicator of length because you can manipulate typeface and page margins. Word count is the agreed-upon publishing metric.
Which Obama autobiography because he has like 6
I think the Russians might have something to say about the classics being shorter
First, you have to distinguish chronicle and literature. 90% of the market is just chronicle, and I could agree with you. The more tight the story is, the better, but for that I would just watch Netflix. Literature, on the other hand is just another thing. I would happily read another 10.000 pages of Proust.
Today there was another thread, an article of Eco about Dumas, explaining the point you’re trying to make.
If you’re talking non-fiction, I could see where things the author writes are “unnecessary,” but in fiction, what’s “unnecessary” is personal opinion. I have nothing against long books. I read a lot of them. If the story’s good, what difference does it make to me how long it is? Reading is supposed to be an enjoyment, not, “This book needs to stop wasting my time!”
In the 19th century authors (mostly in France) were literally paid for how much they wrote, hence why many books of the feuilleton genre are thousands of pages (but that’s also my favorite genre). Long books are in no way a new thing and to say that most classics sit in the 200-300 pages range is untrue in my opinion. I’ve read *a lot* of classics and I would say that the average length of the books I’ve read is 500 pages. There are shorter classics but there are also a lot longer ones. I don’t think books are getting longer at all.
edit: also, I would say they’re getting shorter? Besides some really big books, most contemporary books are actually in that range you said
This is a wildly silly claim, with the whole of 21st century literature represented by one biography and two “epic” novels about people riding dragons.
just read
I feel like you’re picking and choosing to make your point.
A presidential memoir should be as long or as short as the former president wants it to be. That’s him writing his version of how he wants to be remembered. It’s a crazy idea that there should be some arbitrary ideal page count he should be edited down to fit.
Fantasy novels as a genre tend to run long. YA fiction tends to run short. YA Fantasy tends to start short and then get longer as the series goes on and the readers get older (and the author more successful).
There are great long books and terrible short books. If I’m enjoying the read, I don’t’ care about page count at all. That’s really only a useful metric if you’re wondering how long it might take you to get through something before you start, and even that’s a bit of a false premise, because there are page-turning long books and densely written short books.
I think authors have to make their best judgement call as they’re writing, about how much is the right amount. There have always been short books, and long books, and some have felt like the right length, and some haven’t. I haven’t personally noticed that the lengths of books seem to be trending differently in recent years.
My criteria is just that the novel is good. It can be short or long, as long as it’s good.
Presidential memoirs tend to be long in general, not part of another literary trend. Baby Bush and Carter wrote pretty brief memoirs, but Baby Bush isn’t very smart and Carter didn’t have much time.
This sub and sweeping generalizations about books as a whole seem to go hand in hand.
My man has not seen a 19th century or early 20th century book in his life. I’d reply in more detail but I still have *Crime and Punishment*, *War and Peace*, *Demons*, *The Count of Monte Cristo* and *Ulysses* to get through. Luckily, like most classics they should be about 200-300 pages each, nothing too bad. After that I’m going to have a go at *The Faerie Queene*, shouldn’t take more than a few days.
A book should be as long as it needs to be but no longer. (I think I’m paraphrasing Gandalf, oh well Tolkien knew a thing or two about longish books.)
So is your grip with the fact that they are too prolix or that they tell stories that are too long?
Because people could and still can write 3,4,5,6 volume novels and sagas, because they have a very long story with numerous characters, while also using a concise style.
So don’t read them. There are plenty of shorter books still being published.
Citation needed.
My ideal book length is ~400-600 pages.
I am quite a fast reader – not because of any like “speed reading” practice or goals or anything, my natural reading pace has just always been fast since I was a child. But because of that I *very* rarely will even consider choosing a book if it is less than 300 pages because I just fly through them and find I don’t get much out of it. Shorter books just don’t give me the immersive reading experience I enjoy. Also, I’m trying to spend less money on books so longer books keep me out of the bookstore longer lol.
HAHAHAH OMG Have you ever heard of a little story called War and Peace? Ullyses? The Ring Trilogy?
🤣🤣🤣the amount of butthurt here is too funny. Spellcheck is also not your friend apparently. A book just is. Read it or don’t. 🤷🏻♂️
I don’t think much has changed since the days when serialization was popular and authors were paid by the page, leading to some bloating in quite a number of classics. The difference, to me, is that I think that was a lot more forgivable in the days before television and the Internet, and before the global market plus substantial disposable income hit us with more books than anyone can read in a lifetime.
At the end of the day, tho, it all comes down to the individual case. Some authors can release a 1000-page tome but keep the pacing immaculate. Others will release a trilogy where the entire second book feels like padding. Can’t really make a clear-cut line based on length alone. And as I get older, my tolerance for bloating in books has really worn down.
A good reader recognizes oatmeal and skips it.
“Demon Copperhead” 560 pages
“The Covenant of Water” 715 pages
“The Splendid and the Vile” 608 pages
All worth reading but I agree the length can be a bit of a slog. All three books I stopped a short while and went back to finish them later. Glad I did.
I don’t feel qualified to say whether or not the assertion that books are getting longer is true. I read 200+ books a year, but in any given year probably 2/3 are non-fiction where length is more determined by genre than era (eg pop science books vs biographies of world historic figures). And of the fiction that I read, only a small fraction of what I read in any given year is less than 5 or 10 years old. So I dont have a big enough sampe size.
The examples that OP gives aren’t convincing though. They cite a presidential memoir and a fantasy book. Again, its important to compare like to like.
Presidential memoirs are typically very long. In the Penguin edition, Ulysses S Grant’s memoirs, which only cover his pre-presidential years (admittedly his pre-presidential years were more substantial than Obama’s) , is 704 pages. Clinton’s memoir is 1058. Nixon’s is 1120. Eisenhower’s take up three volumes (1 for WWII and 1 for each of his terms) and each of those is over 600 pages. Obama’s is, if anything, on the shorter side for the genre.
With fantasy, ever since Lord of the Rings the dominant mode has been to tell epic stories with intricate world building. This tends to cause fantasy books to be pretty long. GRR Martin, Robert Jordan, even NK Jemison (whose books are basically Raymond Carver stories in comparison coming in at a typical 4-600 pages) all have lengthy page counts.
I do think that there is something to be said for the short novel and novella as a form though. So many of my favorite books are not only great books that happen to be short, but great books whose greatness is bound up in their short length–in the pacing, structure and emotional tenor created by the constraints of a <200 page length. The Great Gatsby, Mrs Dalloway, Heart of Darkness, Catcher in the Rye, The Bluest Eye, Jesus’ Son etc etc. There is a tightness and control and unified emotional tenor that I feel when reading these books.
And then I have favorites like the Brothers Karamazov, which is a baggy 800 page monster encompassing murder mystery, soap opera, religious drama, coming of age tale and, oh wait, the one character wants to read you his existential poetic historical drama for 80 pages. And thats what makes it great! (I think Vonnegut has a line in one of his books where a character refers to the Brothers Karamazov as encompassing the entirety of human existance).
I hope its not the case that shorter novels are being pushed out of the market though. Probably my three favorite currently working novelists are Han Kang, Moshin Hamid and George Saunders (who I will keep calling a novelist until I will a second novel into existence) and they have written exclusively short novels. Sigrid Nunez is also great and her books are written so that you can read them in a sitting. Colson Whitehead usually keeps it under 350 and my favorite of his by far is Nickel Boys which is just over 200 pages. My favorite currently working crime novelist is Megan Abbott and all of the books of hers I’ve read have hovered somewhere between 250 and 350 pages. Jordan Harper and SA Cosby are two of my other favorite current crime novelist and neither of them have gone over 350 pages either.
Who are some of your favorite short novel writers??
A good book can’t be too long.
>”If there is anywhere a thing said in two sentences that could have been as clearly and engagingly said in one, then it’s amateur work.”
Why use so many words when less words is clearer Robert?
I’ve read novellas that felt too long and 1000+ page books that I wished I had more of. Different stories need different lengths, and putting everything into the same box really isn’t all that helpful.
Thank you. My exact same thoughts. For me, most of the books over 400-500 pages don’t have a reason to be that long.
I disagree. Older books imo are filled with waffling nonsense that newer books just dont have. I tried to read that book about the 10000 greeks in persia and it nearly gave me a stroke with all the empty filler.
A book like the count of monte cristo is good. But you can easily tell the guy was payed by the number of words
For a new author trying to get published, the agreed on length for a novel is ~75,000-100,000 words. In word, Times New Roman, double spaced, 1 inch margins, a page has ~250-300 words, so the publishing guideline is ~250-400 pages for most genres. SciFi/Fantasy a bit longer and epic fantasy about double that.
Anecdotally, most popular paperbacks I see are about 300-400 pages. Comparing long books about popular public figures or books from well-established authors that publishers know are going to sell isn’t the best way to judge overall book length. Those are the exceptions, not the rule.
Maybe instead of books being too long, your attention span and appreciation of nuance are lacking.
I like long books though…. If the story is well written it doesn’t matter if its 700 pages. To me the joy is to read and get lost in the stories, not necsssary read a lot of different books.