Size Matters -- What Are Your Favorite Shortest and Longest Novels? (9/11/22)

[Marc]

Share some of your favorite novels at the extremes of length (shortest and/or longest) regardless of publication year.

[Bretnie]

Favorite short novel: Fever Dream (183 very fast pages)

I'm embarrassed I can't think of a favorite long novel! The first thing that came to mind was The Three-Body Problem but it turns out the books aren't in the "extreme" length.

[Hugh]

It is easier to think of long ones - War and Peace, Against the Day and Ducks, Newburyport being obvious examples. I think the shortest book I have is non-fiction - Robert MacFarlane's Holloway. Short novels are always in danger of being described as novellas or even short stories.

[Bill]

Bretnie wrote: "Favorite short novel: Fever Dream (183 very fast pages)"

I really liked Fever Dream as well.

Very long novels are tough for me. But when I was younger and more patient, I did love Infinite Jest. No surprise, I know.

[Joy D]

Long(ish): The Mirror & the Light - Mantel, The Big Rock Candy Mountain - Stegner, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay - Chabon, A Fine Balance - Mistry

Most of my favorite long books are non-fiction.

Short: Assembly - Brown, A Mercy - Morrison, Montana 1948 - Watson, Cannery Row - Steinbeck, Embers - Marai

I do not tie the term "novella" to anything negative. For me, it is simply a short novel.

[Catherine]

Long books. My son made me read The Grace of Kings, which I didn't like at all. All battles, light on female characters, men are gods' puppets. The Books of Jacob nearly killed me. A deep dive into Jewish mysticism. Incredibly long and difficult. At the other end of the spectrum, Stalingrad was magnificent.

[Marc]

I think of The Three-Body Problem as a pretty long book.

You can throw in novellas. No strict definition here of long or short, just looking for those towards one extreme and/or the other.

Candide and Assembly come immediately to mind for shortest faves.

I'll go with Don Quixote for longest (although I like many that have already been mentioned).

[Lark]

shortest:

The Driver's Seat by Muriel Spark
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
The Judge and His Hangman by Friedrich Dürrenmatt
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson
Three Plastic Rooms by Petra Hůlová
Man Tiger by Eka Kurniawan
Mrs. Dalloway by virginia woolf
Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera
Die, My Love by Ariana Harwicz
Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Shua Dusapin
The Blizzard by Vladimir Sorokin
Ransom by David Malouf
Loving Sabotage by Amélie Nothomb
The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing
The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas
The Wedding of Zein by Tayeb Salih
A Personal Matter by Kenzaburō Ōe


longest:

The Magic Mountain
The Brothers Karamazov

[Bretnie]

Joy D wrote: "Long(ish): The Mirror & the Light - Mantel, The Big Rock Candy Mountain - Stegner, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay - Chabon, A Fine Balance - Mistry

Most of my favorite long books are no..."

Ooh, yes to Kavalier & Clay and A Fine Balance - both in the 600ish pages range!

I found this list that reminded me of a handful of other long favorites:
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/3...
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell at 1000 pages
American Gods at more than 600
Cryptonomicon at more than 1100 pages (how did I forget how long that book is?!)

[Robert]

My fave short novels: Fup, Train Dreams, The Prime of Miss jean Brodie

I actually prefer long novels: Ducks, Newburyport, A Prayer for Owen Meany, A Fine Balance, Cutting for Stone, A Suitable Boy , Underworld, Freedom, The Goldfinch, Kafka on the Shore, A Little Life and To Paradise. Saying that I used to read more of them when I was in my twenties and early thirties

[LindaJ^]

These are the longest (more than 1000 pages) that I have rated 4 or 5 stars, most read before I signed on to Goodreads 10 years ago:

Fiction
By James A. Michener -- Texas; Hawaii; The Source; and Centennial
By Colleen McCullough -- The First Man in Rome and The Grass Crown
By George R.R. Martin -- A Dance with Dragons: A Song of Ice and Fire Series, Book 5 and A Feast for Crows;
By John Jakes -- Love and War;
By Nino Haratischwili -- The Eighth Life;
By Stephen King -- Under the Dome;
By Herman Wouk -- War and Remembrance;
By Ken Follett -- World Without End;
By Margaret Mitchell -- Gone with the Wind; and
By Susanna Clarke -- Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Non-fiction
By Robert A. Caro -- Master of the Senate; and
By David McCullough -- Truman

These are the shortest (120pp or less) that I have rated 4 or 5 stars, most of which read in the last 5 years
Fiction
By Natasha Brown -- Assembly;
By Isabel Waidner -- Gaudy Bauble;
By Anne Serre -- The Governesses;
By Julián Fuks -- Resistance;
By John Steinbeck -- Of Mice and Men;
By Caitlín R. Kiernan -- Agents of Dreamland;
By Melissa Lee-Houghton -- That Lonesome Valley;
By Luis Sagasti -- A Musical Offering;
By H.G. Wells -- The Time Machine;
By Claire Keegan -- Small Things Like These; and
By Alan Bennett -- The Uncommon Reader

Non-fiction
By Annie Dillard -- The Writing Life;
By Elie Wiesel -- Night

[Kathleen]

I see lots of books I've loved here!

Some of my favorites
short:
Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
Summer by Edith Wharton
Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
Train Dreams by Denis Johnson

long:
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
War and Peaceby Leo Tolstoy
Middlemarch by George Eliot
A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey

[Lesley]

Long
The Executioner's Song
2666
The Mirror & the Light

Short
Heart of Darkness
The Great Gatsby
The Quiet American

[Vesna]

Longest:
Devils
Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family
The Portrait of a Lady

Shortest:
Wittgenstein's Nephew
The Death of Ivan Ilych
To the Lighthouse
Candide
The Aspern Papers
The Little Prince

[Janet]

Already mentioned shorts I’ve loved: The Uncommon Reader, Aspern Papers , Summer (and, since I grew up near Wharton country I need to add Ethan Frome) as well as Small Things Like These, Assembly

I’d like to add
Closely Watched Trains
Too Loud a Solitude

Most of Georges Simenonnovels were designed to be read at one sitting

Short non-fiction but fun to read
The Gardener's Year

As for long novels, I prefer trilogies or tetralogies, but for a standalone, I loved Every Man Dies Alone

[Alwynne]

Again, a number already mentioned: 2666, The Executioner's Song, War and Peace, Giovanni's Room

Then in no particular order:

Long:

The longest, if you go by the author’s description of each of her 13 volumes as chapters in an overall novel, is Dorothy Richardson’s pioneering, modernist work Pilgrimage, complete in 4 volumes – which I’m currently re-reading.

Stalingrad

Life and Fate

Vanity Fair

Anna Karenina

The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

Bleak House

Short:

Great Granny Webster

Ice

Schoolgirl

The Member of the Wedding

Quicksand

Olivia

Territory of Light

[Tracy]

Long:
Don Quixote
Vanity Fair
Anna Karenina
Brothers Karamazov
Anything by Dickens
In Search of Lost Time
Infinite Jest

Short:
Go Tell it On the Mountain
Giovanni’s Room
Elena Knows
A Christmas Carol
Anything by Toni Morrison

There are so many great books- these are off the top of my head. I’m sure there are tons that I’ve forgotten.

Oh! Short- Frankenstein, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, anything by Ali Smith
Long- Middlemarch, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle

[RJ - Slayer of Trolls]

SHORT
The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins
A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain
Black Wings Has My Angel by Elliott Chaze
Thieves Like Us by Edward Anderson
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls

LONG
A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, and A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
The Terror by Dan Simmons

[Hugh]

My earlier comment was just the ones I remembered without looking anything up.

Looking at my read books:

Longest (over 1000 pages):
War and Peace
Against the Day
(excluding The Lord of the Rings, because it was originally three books)
The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution
Infinite Jest
4 3 2 1
The Penguin History of the World
Ducks, Newburyport
The Karamazov Brothers
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Near misses (850+, at least in the editions I read):
Stalingrad, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, The Eighth Life, The Books of Jacob, Our Mutual Friend, The Mirror & the Light, Gravity's Rainbow, 2666, The Count of Monte Cristo, A Place of Greater Safety, The Goldfinch, Life and Fate, Buddenbrooks, Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda

Short books (< 100 pages)
Holloway
The War of the Poor
The Philosophy of Beards (a joke Christmas present)
The Newton Letter
A Month in the Country [page count reduced from 112 to 85 since I read it and I am not sure this is right!]
The Smell of Hay
The Fall
The Passport
Dream Story
Cove

Near misses (<110):
The Journey to the East, The Driver's Seat, Famished, The Time Machine, The Testament of Mary, The Cemetery in Barnes, The Long Dry, Assembly, A Life's Music, Beowulf (the Heaney version), Aliss at the Fire, Gaudy Bauble, Bonjour Tristesse, The Train Was on Time

At the shorter end of the scale errors in GR page counts are more significant, and I am sure there are shorter books in terms of word count than some of these, for example The White Book

[Maggie]

Yes to lots of these long books. But where is Mark Helprin? Winter's Tale, A Soldier of the Great War, In Sunlight and in Shadow. I'll also add as a short book Grief Is the Thing With Wings.

[Simona]

Long ones :

The Magus by John Fowles
1Q84 by Murakami
Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky
Proust's complete "In search of lost time"
Not yet a favourite as I just started it - but has potential : Confiteor, by Jaume Cabre.

Short ones:

Animal farm by Orwell
Of mice and men by Steinbeck
Ciuleandra by Liviu Rebreanu
Just the plague by Ludmila Ulickaja
A day at the beach by Heere Heeresma
The blind owl by Sadegh Hedayat

[Janet]

RJ - Slayer of Trolls wrote: "SHORT
The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins
A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Postman Always Rings Twice ..."

I have a copy of Black Wings. Haven’t gotten to it yet. Will have to add to my TBR

[RJ - Slayer of Trolls]

Maggie wrote: "Yes to lots of these long books. But where is Mark Helprin? Winter's Tale, A Soldier of the Great War, In Sunlight and in Shadow. I'll also add as a short book Grief Is the Thing With Wings."

I think you meant Grief is the Thing with Feathers? I couldn't find it under the other title.

This thread is terrific - I have found a whole bunch of books I want to read. :)

[RJ - Slayer of Trolls]

Janet wrote: "I have a copy of Black Wings. Haven’t gotten to it yet. Will have to add to my TBR..."

I thought it was terrific. Dark and beautiful.

[Bretnie]

RJ - Slayer of Trolls wrote: "This thread is terrific - I have found a whole bunch of books I want to read. :)
"

Yes! Although I'm adding more of the short books than the long books to my "to read" list, ha. :)

[Ellen]

Short is (recent) Night Train to Tangier by Kevin Barry. Characters are so compelling and structure and slow revelations are really brilliant. I can't say this is my favorite long work but I did feel most accomplished after finishing Ulysses by Joyce. How about that. Two Irish authors.

[Ellen]

RJ - Slayer of Trolls wrote: "SHORT
The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins
A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Postman Always Rings Twice ..."

Cloud Atlas did not seem long to me...maybe in page count but not in structure. Truly one of the most moving novels I've read recently.

[Ellen]

Lesley wrote: "Long
The Executioner's Song
2666
The Mirror & the Light

Short
Heart of Darkness
The Great Gatsby
The Quiet American"
You are spot on with all of these! Amazing. I think of Executioner's song as non fiction. 2666 started out being four books I read. Some of those scenes are etched in my memory. Thanks for sharing these.

[Tamara]

Long ones:

Independent People by Halldór Laxness
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov.
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
The Hummingbird's Daughter by Luis Alberto Urrea
War Music: An Account of Homer's Iliad by Christopher Logue
Omeros by Derek Walcott
The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov

Short ones:
Hotel Silence by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir.
Baba Dunja's Last Love by Alina Bronsky.
An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine.
Ransom by David Malouf
People of the Whale by Linda Hogan
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by Unknown
Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry
Stoner by John Williams
Three Apples Fell from the Sky by Narine Abgaryan

I think I'd better stop :)