Long or short, thick or thin

[TidiousTed]

Do you prefer thick or thin books.

Personally I hate to realize I find a book well written, the characters likable, the plot engaging and knowing it is just 150 - 200 pages long. So I like thick, thick books. 1000, 1200 pages type of books. I'm just about to start on Fall of Giants by Ken Follett, its 940 pages and I'm looking forward to read it. I've read most of his books so I am pretty sure I not going to be disappointed.

 

[DNO]

I seem to prefer the 600-700 page range...although I'll read anything decent. If the book is engaging, I prefer a lengthy volume. I just finished Douglas Preston's Impact (400 odd pages) and found it surprisingly good. Presently, I'm reading C. J. Sansom's Revelation (550 pages) and I am finding it quite engaging.

Basically, I think quality is what matters to me, rather than length. I find with a good read that the story comes to a natural and satisfactory conclusion regardless of length.

 

[Yeps]

Yes. I prefer thick or thin books.

 

[Pompidou]

Sometimes, a short narrative condensed down to the raw essentials is very powerful. It's hard to write something of length without useless filler. Lengthy quality beats short quality, but short quality beats lengthy filler.

 

[davidraphael]

For me it depends entirely on the writer and/or style. I recently inhaled W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage and Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (both of which I think are 700+ pages), but struggled through Kazuo's Ishiguro's Pale View of Hills, which is really only a novella (incidentally, I normally really like Ishiguro).

But then I love Camus, Richard Brautigan, and Hesse, all of whom mostly wrote novella length works, but I struggle through Tolstoy's longer works.

I struggle through Thomas Pynchon novels of any length!

The fat books on my shelf that are still awaiting me include: The Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, USA by Dos Passos, and Ancient Evenings and Harlot's Ghost by Norman Mailer, all of which are considerably more than 1000 pages.


I'm a self confessed reading snob, and I couldn't justify spending any time reading a long novel if it's pulpy/holiday reading type material. And I won't read books of any length if they're written by authors such as Dan Brown, John Grisham, Stephen King, Patricia Cornwell et al - you know the kind, charity/thrift stores are piled high with them.

 

[Philip Adams]

I don't mind how long or short a novel is as long as it's a good story and well written. 'Of Mice and Men' and 'War and Peace' are both excellent books in my opinion.

Maybe it's just a perception thing but I tend to think that novels are longer today than they used to be. I'm not sure why that is, but if you look through second hand bookshops at novels from say, the 1940s to the late 1960s there seem to be quite a number that are shorter than novels today.

I know it's not a universal thing as there were some quite lengthy novels published in the 19th and 20th centuries. Yet I don't often see recently published novels of less than 350 pages.

Does anyone else have any thoughts on this?

 

[TidiousTed]

Lengthy quality beats short quality, but short quality beats lengthy filler.

That was one of my points, when starting this thread But I also read for another reason, to keep languages I know alive and to build up vocabulary, so I read books in English, Swedish, Danish, German and Icelandic apart from my native Norwegian. And if at all possible I never read translated books.