The Sword and Laser discussion
Book Length over time
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Oh, definitely. They can't even reprint single volumes of Peter F. Hamilton's Mandel Files; they have to put 2 of the novels together. Granted there are some exceptions; people like Scalzi and Haldeman get away with putting out short novels.
I thought it was just because I used to read faster when I was a teenager in the 70's and 80's. I do think there are more serials around nowadays. More books in past decades seemed to be stand alone stories. Again, it is probably more my perception than actual fact but it seems that way to me.
I agree Andrew, there seem to be a lot more series around these days. I like to read a stand alone in between series as a way to clear my brain of the emotions and connections to characters. I find it increasingly more difficult to find books that are not tied to others.
Alex wrote: "Now, when I read a book that is only 200–300 pages long, I find it hard to get involved enough with the story—I'm a fan of slow world building and character development. "I was in Half-Price Books over the holidays browsing the SF/F section (like I do) and I really noticed how thin books used to be. I pulled down the second book from the Pelbar Cycle and marveled, "How did Paul O. Williams cram so much stuff into 200 pages? That's *amazing*." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_O._...
Andrew wrote: "I thought it was just because I used to read faster when I was a teenager in the 70's and 80's."
My thought exactly. I was like, "How could I have read an entire book in two days while going to school? That's impossible." Then I realized it's because most of them were only a couple hundred pages long. 200 pages barely gets you out of the prologue in a Stephen King doorstop.
Andrew wrote: "I do think there are more serials around nowadays. More books in past decades seemed to be stand alone stories. Again, it is probably more my perception than actual fact but it seems that way to me."
Michelle wrote: "I agree Andrew, there seem to be a lot more series around these days. I like to read a stand alone in between series as a way to clear my brain of the emotions and connections to characters. I find it increasingly more difficult to find books that are not tied to others."
I wonder if that's true. It feels true. Is there a way to look that up?
Of the books that started me down this train of thought, every single one of them were part of a series: The Well World Saga, The Pelbar Cycle, The Shannara Series, Dragonriders of Pern, Xanth, Asimov's Foundation, etc. The exceptions to the short book rule really stood out, such as Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant or Kurtz's Deryni Chronicles. (Maybe it's that word: chronicles.)
After a while I did come up with stand-alones, but I read a lot of series back then. Perhaps more than today, actually.
Tamahome wrote: "Granted there are some exceptions; people like Scalzi and Haldeman get away with putting out short novels."
Re-reading Old Man's War I was struck by its throwback nature. Now I'm wondering if it's not just the story itself but also the fact that it's 368 pages long. Starship Troopers is 288 pages while The Forever War is 264. By those standards OMW is bloated, but compared to current novels it feels slim.
I recently picked up
The Postmortal by Drew Magary and my first reaction was, "Wow, this is a tiny book!" But it's 384 pages! When did my perceptions shift so much that a book which is nearly twice as long as Larry Niven's Protector and 30 pages longer than Ringworld (!!!) become "tiny" in my view?
Newer author are definitely putting out much longer books these days. My all time favorite fantasy series the chronicles of amber by roger zelazny which consists of five books is probably shorter than one long winding Rothfussian tome. Most of the old sci-fi and fantasy books I have are under 250 pages, but I can't think of a new book in same genre that I've read that wasn't well over 500.
Long novels are nothing new. Les Miserables is about 1400 pages unabridged, and the book we call "The Man in the Iron Mask," is actually just a section of a much longer novel. In the 19th Century, the common format for British novels was the "triple decker," a single novel of about 900 broken into three volumes due to cost and deficiencies in binding technology.Modern sci-fi novels tend to be thicker than older ones, but that's not necessarily because of length. If you look at books from the '60s and '70s you'll find that they tend to have tiny print compared to nowadays -- if you go into a used book store, you can even compare copies of the same book and see that modern editions tend to be thicker. The ones that actually are short, you'll find, tend to be novels originally serialized in magazines.
Fantasy did get excessively bloated for a while around the turn of the century, but bookstores put their foot down because the big epic bricks took up too much shelf-space -- why should they stock one book for $9.99 when they can fit two or three in the same space for $8.99? Nowadays only a handful of established bestsellers can justify 1000-page behemoths.
Dune was turn down by publishers because it was too large of a book at the time, especially for science fiction.
I get the feeling that books used to be shorter because of the "pulp" mentality of just cranking books out as fast as you can. Authors were putting out multiple books a year if they could, so you didn't have this long wait time between novels that you do now. SO maybe we are still getting close to the same page count by authors now, but it is condensed into thicker novlels instead of multiple short ones.
As I mentioned, there have always been long books. But overall it seems to me that books have gotten longer on average.My copy of Frankenstein is 256 pages long and the typeface is ordinary size. I have an annotated and illustrated 20,000 Leagues that's only 411 pages. Dracula, 336. Last of the Mohicans, the same. I have an old Call of the Wild/White Fang duo that's only 361 pages long.
You can buy the complete works of Mark Twain (illustrated!) on Kindle for $1.99, 300+ works at 8,430 pages. I don't know what A Song of Ice and Fire will be when it's finished, but it's already more than half that now.
Edit: 4,900 pages even in paperback. Holy crap.
Trike wrote: "As I mentioned, there have always been long books. But overall it seems to me that books have gotten longer on average.My copy of Frankenstein is 256 pages long and the typeface is ordinary size...."
The existence of short novels in the past doesn't prove that long ones weren't common. Let's look at some of the major works of 19th Century literature:
Great Expectations - 748 pages
Bleak House - 1036
David Copperfield - 950
Pamela - 592
The Eustace Diamond - 688
The Woman in White - 720
Can You Forgive Her - 848
Phineas Finn - 704
Vanity Fair - 896
The Way We Live Now - 800
The Mill and the Floss - 704
Middlemarch - 904
War and Peace - 1424
The Brothers Karamazov - 736
Anna Karenina - 1008
Mysteries of Udolpho - 704
Clarissa - 1534
The Woman in White - 720
Melmoth the Wanderer - 706
Les Miserables - 1488
The Three Musketeers - 784
Twenty Years After - 880
The Vicomte de Braglione - 768
The Man in the Iron Mask - 656
The complete works of Trollope or Dickens by themselves dwarf The Wheel of Time and Song of Ice and Fire combined.
Weird. War and Peace and the like sound right, but the others look really long. I only have The Three Musketeers, but my copy is 560 pages. 784 sounds like a large print edition.I just saw this article arguing that books are actually getting shorter: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael...
I wonder if anyone has done a comprehensive survey of book length over the years.
Instead of using page count you guys should be using word count because page count is so subjective based upon font size. I'm pretty sure that the longest book I've ever read was Imagica by Clive Barker. My paperback copy was something like 1200 pages with tightly packed print whereas according to wikipedia the hardback was only 825 pages (still looking for a word count). If it used a font and spacing like most books it probably would have topped 2500 pages. So far I can't find a word count for Imagica but I've found a lot of people saying the same thing I say - its very long with very dense pages. Its a good book but its massive.
I'm reading The Three Musketeers right now and it is 755 pages long. But Dumas pére was kind of a pioneer in his field(he was sort of like a tv show creater and showrunner of his time); he was working with a writing staff and publishing novels in serial form and making them as long as possible. He also "wrote" two sequels to his D'artagnan series using same method.
Rik wrote: "Instead of using page count you guys should be using word count because page count is so subjective based upon font size."Excellent point. Now we just need a list.
Wiki has the longest works: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_...
Here's an article with some word counts: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03...
Supposedly Amazon will automatically count both word length and number of characters, but I don't see how to do that. I guess it's only for certain books.
This site seems to do word counts: http://www.arbookfind.com/UserType.aspx Just pick one of the choices on that main page, type in a book's name and you'll get a word count when you click on the book's title. I tried a few and they all gave me counts.
To be honest I wasn't using word nor page count. I was just using the fully scientific method of seeing how chunky the books look on my bookcase!!
If you look into it there are almost certainly going to be epic long works of fiction and quicker shorter works at any point in time. Perhaps the question shouldn't be 'are books getting longer?' but maybe 'are longer books more popular now?' so they are more noticeable.It may not necessarily be an ongoing trend that books are getting longer but maybe with the big success some are having they are currently in vogue.
I think that there's a cycle to the length prefered by audiences. Everything published from 1995-2000 seemed to verge on 900+ pages. Then things got shorter for a decade; and I think are, in general, getting shorter. Steampunk, urban fantasy, and hard science fiction genre books all rarely break 500 pages.Epic Fantasy and Space opera still tend to be doorstops, but that's a function of their genres and expected.
I keep hoping that shot stories will make a comeback. With digital formats, it's easier than ever to try an anthology, or monthly ezine. Hopefully the pendulum will continue to shorter fiction.
I'm mostly interested in seeing if my impression is correct, that books are indeed getting longer overall. We can then discuss if that's due to fashion or to technology -- or if one drives the other, as is so often the case -- but I'd like to establish a baseline.Well, I'd like someone *else* to establish a baseline. Anyone know any English majors who haven't decided on their PhD thesis yet? :D
The Sword and Laser
Books mentioned in this topic
Old Man's War (other topics)Starship Troopers (other topics)
The Forever War (other topics)
The Postmortal (other topics)
Protector (other topics)
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In general, are books longer nowadays than in previous decades?
I was moving a bunch of my books around and realized not many of the ones from the 70s and 80s were longer than 350 pages. Many were quite a bit shorter, in fact. I distinctly recall buying
I read the excellent
I'm still reading plenty of books that are in the 350+/- pages zone, such as the Destroyermen series, but they seem to be the exceptions rather than the rule. Long books have always been out there, of course, but it feels to me like page counts are increasing overall.
Anyone else seeing this?