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What's wrong with long books?
“I am guilty of never having read Anna Karenina, because it’s just so long. I’d much rather read two 300-page books than one 600-page book.”
Here is the link, which details the recent publishing attempt to mutilate Moby Dick and other classics. Of course I've yet to read Terra Nostra (785 big pp.) by Carlos Fuentes. Why not? No one is doubting that many long books are good books. Doesn't the Modigliani-Miller theorem teach us that nominal variables are irrelevant? Can't you, on your own, turn Anna Karenina into a larger number of shorter books? Just a few months ago I bought a collection of five Eric Ambler novels, in one volume, and ripped it into five separate, easy to transport pieces.
As usual, I can think of a few hypotheses:
1. The detachable book is in fact the wave of the future, we just haven't seen it yet.
2. The blog post is the detachable book.
3. What people enjoy is finishing books, and the resulting feeling of satisfaction, not reading them.
4. What people enjoy is starting books, not reading them. Starting books is a bit like going shopping, but after the actual reading starts ennui soon sets in. The books of the future (present?) will allow readers to feel they are starting a new product every chapter. (Is the real secret of blogs simply that readers always enjoy the promise of starting something new? How many of you spend hours with the MR archives, still highly relevant and of course always stellar in quality?)
Here is a meditation on reading Pynchon, commentary here. I'm now pawing through Against the Day -- slowly -- and so far enjoying it.
Here is my earlier post on this topic, I believe that today I am contradicting my earlier self. Of course that is obvious to anyone who has read through the archives.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on May 1, 2007 at 10:10 AM in Books | Permalink
Comments
Sorry to take a left turn on the topic but how did you like the Eric Ambler books?. Have you tried Allan Furst?
Posted by: Press at May 1, 2007 10:21:55 AM
When I was taking Calculus in college, I borrowed the text (Stewart, of course), from a friend. He and his older sister had both been taking Calculus at the same time, but while he was in the first quarter she was in the third. They tore the book in half and then moved the appropriate answers to the front half.
It was a great relief carrying the half-weight Stewart around rather than the full size. Since it was easier to carry, it tended to occupy a space in my backpack most days, which meant that I could always study a bit when I had a free half hour. If I'd been dealing with the complete book, I doubt I would have carried it anywhere but to class and back.
The same problem exists with fat novels and other books, especially when one uses a messenger bag. I'm far more likely to slip a thin Dover book into my bag to read on the train than a thick novel. I'd love to see detachable books, especially textbooks like MWG.
Posted by: Jaclyn at May 1, 2007 10:44:25 AM
I read books for the resolution. Often I find myself reading introductions and conclusions first, and if I have time reading other parts. (non-fiction that is)
Posted by: Christopher Prottas at May 1, 2007 10:50:14 AM
Can't you, on your own, turn Anna Karenina into a larger number of shorter books? Just a few months ago I bought a collection of five Eric Ambler novels, in one volume, and ripped it into five separate, easy to transport pieces.
Er, no, I think novels generally try to be more immodular (all pieces fit together for a very specific reason)
and self-contained (no need to assume the reader is already a fan of your work) than that. I also think
you're confusing the physical and the artistic division of a work. (or trying to be funny)
That said, the cynic in me (supported by the recent Joshua Bell thing) would support 3) and 4). Basically,
in literature, I see this sort of thing happen:
1) "Hey, people still read Work of Literature X, even five years after publication. Obviously, obviously
there is cultural and/or artistic significance and therefore we should teach it to literature students."
2) Five years later: "Hey, people still study X, even ten years after its publication. Obvioulsy, obviously,
there is cultural and/or artistic significance and therefore we should teach it to literature students."
3) Ten years later: "Hey, people still study X, even twenty years after its publication. Obvioulsy, obviously,
there is cultural and/or artistic significance and therefore we should teach it to literature students."
4) Repeat until present, in which virtually no one voluntarily commits their own time to reading X except a) to impress
others, b) to get a feeling of accomplishment from doing something painful and tedious, or c) because the
form they're currently enjoying has been dumbed down to near unrecognizability.
Posted by: Person at May 1, 2007 10:57:33 AM
That's why Dickens is great: if you read four chapters a month over the course of two years, you're not slow or lazy -- you're reading it as the author intended!
Posted by: Mike at May 1, 2007 11:03:46 AM
While I'm personally not opposed to long books, I do have difficulty not finishing a book I've begun. I don't know if this is a common attitude, but could it be possible that people are afraid that they won't like a book and, having begun reading a long novel and realizing it isn't for them, have trouble accepting 'defeat' and stopping in the middle of the reading?
Posted by: Christopher at May 1, 2007 11:18:31 AM
I found the 900-odd pages of Sacred Games fascinating from beginning to end, and am profoundly grateful to you, Tyler, for having drawn my attention to it.
Posted by: Alan Little at May 1, 2007 11:21:08 AM
The problem with 600 page books is that most of them could have been 300 pages books without losing anything from the plot. A well written 600 book is a joy to read. However, there does frequently seem to be an inverse correlation between quality and number of pages.
Posted by: COD at May 1, 2007 11:25:29 AM
Er, no, I think novels generally try to be more immodular (all pieces fit together for a very specific reason) and self-contained (no need to assume the reader is already a fan of your work) than that.
Pooh. Many of those long novels were originally published in multiple volumes; they are singles today because it costs less.
Posted by: Anderson at May 1, 2007 11:34:46 AM
Are there really that many 300-page books that are together better than Anna Karenina? I'm guessing no. Even if yes, he can't find the time from some other dull hobby? Read more, fish less.
If someone doesn't like Tolstoy, then fine. But if the page-count is scaring you away, then you weren't serious about reading it in the first place.
Posted by: Trieu Truong at May 1, 2007 11:37:39 AM
Mike has a point -- lots and lots of seemingly endless novels were written in serial format, to be published and read chapter by chapter with time in between. These are exactly the right books to keep in your subway-reading bag, because you can read them in 20 minute chunks without losing narrative flow. I use Thomas Hardy novels for this purpose.
Similarly, many very long books were written by authors being paid by the word. This means that when Victor Hugo suddenly goes into a 200-year history of a certain street in Paris, it's perfectly safe to skip over this, and probably wouldn't offend the author one bit. Use of this technique probably takes about 100 pages off the total length of Les Miserable, for example.
Posted by: LP at May 1, 2007 11:38:22 AM
Just a few months ago I bought a collection of five Eric Ambler novels, in one volume, and ripped it into five separate, easy to transport pieces.
If transportability is the issue, and is a recurring issue, just get an ebook reader. It's probably not worth it for most people, but I commute to work on the subway, and fly moderately frequently on business. Carting around light reading is awkward, and (on the subway) it's hard to flip pages when holding on to the poles, so I got a Sony Reader, and have not had problems since. The only thing that could make it better is if it folded up small enough to fit in an inner suit jacket pocket, or in my trousers (American size novels are usually too big for either, but Japanese novels can typically fit comfortably in a trouser pocket). The Sony e-book store is not particularly good yet, but if you restrict yourself to the out-of-copyright classics (like Anna Karenina), you can get as much as you like from Project Gutenberg.
If it's just that long books are looong, of course, that won't help at all.
Posted by: Taeyoung at May 1, 2007 11:48:36 AM
Anderson:
Pooh. Many of those long novels were originally published in multiple volumes; they are singles today because it costs less.
That they were originally published in novels doesn't contradict their attempt at *artistic* immodularity;
just the opposite: they want you to want to know how the pieces relate and so buy them all. (Perhaps that
detracts from my point about trying to make the work self-contained?) And the fact that they cost less as
one volume does not suffice as a reason for doing it; you have to account for what they can than charge. If
they could milk more of customers by charging them again and again to get the full story, we'd see that.
LP:
Similarly, many very long books were written by authors being paid by the word. This means that when Victor Hugo suddenly goes into a 200-year history of a certain street in Paris, it's perfectly safe to skip over this, and probably wouldn't offend the author one bit.
Heh, good point. I guess I meant that an author only maximizing the quality of work, would tend toward
maximal immodularity.
Posted by: Person at May 1, 2007 11:52:52 AM
The books of the future (present?) will allow readers to feel they are starting a new product every chapter.
Italo Calvino is way ahead of you. See "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler."
Posted by: Graham at May 1, 2007 11:56:52 AM
I find this to be an odd dilemma in my own book-reading experience. I love long books... for example, I'm currently reading "Truman" by David McCullough. It's a massive tome. I read it voraciously because, first, I find it to be fascinating, and secondly, I want to finish it. The only problem is that the satisfaction of finishing it is combined with the disappointment that I've no more of the book to read.
Living in NYC, I find that smaller books are definitely more convenient, especially when reading while traveling on mass transportation.
Posted by: BD at May 1, 2007 11:58:21 AM
Similarly, my wife and I will always pick the shorter of two movies when we're deciding between them. Not that long movies aren't good (in current trends, length and quality probably correlate well, since more low-brow work rarely breaks the 100 minute mark). If we could imagine a book/film-as-alternate-universe hypothesis, then maximizing the number of quality alternate universes experienced makes good sense. Novelty may simply have value unto itself, and that value may be sufficient to ward us all away from big Tolstoy books.
What might be even more interesting is to look at books with long versus short chapters, as my wife and I both strongly prefer short ones. We like having stopping points, we like feeling as if we've accomplished something.
If I go on a picnic, I enjoy just staring out at the river for hours. But if I'm going to engage a book, I want to get somewhere. Not always, but as a general principle. I spent an entire semester on Ulysses in college, and that was certainly worth the effort, and then some.
Posted by: Garrett at May 1, 2007 12:01:06 PM
Is it remotely true that long books are in some way unpopular? It's notoriously difficult to get a reliable list of the best-selling books ever, but Wikipedia steers us to this one - http://qurl.com/2cvqt. The Bible, the Koran, the Book of Common Prayer are all conspicuously long books, and even if you screen the list for just novels the Lord of the Rings trilogy is more than 1000 pages and the longest of the Harry Potters comes in at 768 pages.
Of course, one might point out that a lot of copies of Chairman Mao's Little Red Book (at number two) were somewhat forced purchases, and the activities of the Gideon organisation perhaps mask the true consumer demand for the Bible (at number one). So we turn instead to a recent poll of respondent's favourite books (http://qurl.com/lvd7w) and see Pride and Prejudice or To Kill a Mockingbird at the magic 300 pages each...sitting alongside Lord of the Rings and the Bible again, and The Da Vinci Code, the runaway fictional success of the last few years, sitting at number nine with 560 pages with Catch-22 at 576. Perhaps most tellingly he longest Harry Potter is the only one of that best-selling series to make it into the top ten, beating far shorter instalments of what is fundamentally the same tale.
There's nothing wrong with long books. They make up a good proportion of the most popular books in recent years as well as ever sold. It's just that a lot of alleged classics that happen to be long are also very, very boring, and while people somehow feel they "should" read them they just can't bring themselves to wade through the turgid prose.
Posted by: Seamus McCauley at May 1, 2007 12:12:42 PM
The longueurs in long novels make them unreadable.
Posted by: ricpic at May 1, 2007 12:21:02 PM
I don't think length, by itself at least, is really a factor.
The Harry Potter series clocks in at 309, 352, 448, 734, 870 (!), and 652 pages.
Many other popular books are very long. Check out Stephen King's novels: The Stand - 1200 pages. It - 1138 pages. The Shining - 528 pages.
Or Robert Jordan's popular fantasy series. The now-eleven book series has a hefty 7860 pages: 680, 600, 624, 704, 704, 720, 720, 604, 800, 704, 1000.
Plenty of people read long books. The real factor here is that reading "classics" is a lot more work than reading Harry Potter or Stephen King. And 600 pages of work is a lot more daunting than 300 pages of work.
Posted by: Bob Montgomery at May 1, 2007 12:25:05 PM
About two years ago I was able to slog through the ~1200 pages of Atlas Shrugged. But it is depressing to spend 10 hours reading and not be able to discern any progress by looking at how far your bookmark has moved. On a short book, if I can visualize that progress I feel as though I'm actually accomplishing more than when reading Atlas Shrugged. However, after finishing Atlas I really did feel a great sense of accomplishment; no book is too long for me now.
Coincidentally, I ordered Anna Karenina from Amazon a few days ago.
Posted by: MM at May 1, 2007 12:46:33 PM
Bob M is on the right path, I think. There may, however, be a more fundamental analytic error at work. Who says our host's preferences are universal?
There is evidence imbedded in the various comments here. Harry Potter novels are long, and widely read. King is long, and widely read. Some people like a long read. Some don't. Those musty old classics still sell at B&N, so it isn't just being assigned that gets them read. The premise of this post may simply be in error. There may not be anything wrong with long books, if you happen to like long books.
Posted by: kharris at May 1, 2007 12:49:46 PM
For me, it's risk. I don't want to get to page 400 of 600 and realize "Wait a minute...this is a pile of dreck!". If you're not supposed to judge a book by it's cover, and there aren't all that many books out there worth the time (relatively, and my opinion, of course), it makes sense to be risk-averse.
Posted by: khc at May 1, 2007 12:56:38 PM
My rule is generally not to read books of average length. Shorter books are saying all the author wanted to say, longer books couldn't be compressed losslessly to the most popular length, but average length books are probably short books plus filler to get up to the sales maximizing size.
Posted by: michael vassar at May 1, 2007 12:58:30 PM
Well, many books *are* too long. It's commonly acknowledged in the bookbiz that many nonfiction books, for instance, are just blown-up magazine articles.
Also, when you think about, it's incredibly ... audacious or arrogant or something for authors to ask us to read (for instance) 600 pages, isn't it? Assuming you read at a very good clip, that's at least a 10 hour commitment. Tyler, who seems to have 60 hours in a day, might breeze through such a book in a weekend, but it'd take me a couple of weeks. And what individual -- and whose individual voice -- merits that kind of attention? Would you voluntarily say, OK, I'm going to listen to Person X yak on for 10 hours straight? I mean, would you do that often?
By contrast, a season of a TV series (about the equivalent in length) has all kinds of talents and personalities pitching in for your entertainment's sake: designers, performers, multiple scriptwriters, costume and music people ... Downside: commercial anxiety, too many cooks, etc.
Still, the book-length thang (and our fetishization of it) strikes me as weird. Books are as long as they are in many cases not because that's the right length for them but because book-publishing requires that length. What if you've got a story that tells itself naturally in 80 pages? (And it seems to me that most stories run naturally as prose things around 20-80 pages. Beyond that is padding, writin', authorial ego ... All the more reason to value novels that justify 800 pages, of course. But why not acknowledge that they're rarities?)
Besides, I'm not 600 pages' worth of interested in many stories, or many subjects. I solve the problem for myself where nonfiction is concerned by buying abridged audiobooks. I'll listen to a four-tape version of a biography while commuting or exercising and be quite happy about it (and done with it in fairly short order). But the 600 page full-length bio? I'm just not gonna get around to it.
One of the great things about the internet is that it's freed writing from the old length-predicament of "either it's an article or a book."
Posted by: Michael Blowhard at May 1, 2007 2:00:35 PM
Michael, I find that fascinating because it's so totally the opposite of the way I look at book length.
Part of it is that I read fast. I don't think Atlas Shrugged took more than twelve hours or so the first time I read it; I can't remember the last time I read a novel that took ten hours of concentrated reading (though I'm starting in on Infinite Jest, so that wil probably do it). The reason I don't start books as often as I'd like is that I know that once I start, I'm going to get literally nothing done until I finish—I'll be planted on that bed until the book's over. I don't understand people who can read a fiction book over the course of a couple weeks. It'd drive me nuts.
TV, on the other hand, really annoys me because (for the most part) so little happens and it moves so slow. The spoken word can't transmit information at anywhere near the pace that text can; I can't do audiobooks because most readers read them so slowly that I lose track of what's going on. I also hate the rise of podcasting for this reason; I love reading what people have to say, but can't believe they actually expect me to sit still and listen to them read it about a quarter of the speed.
Finally, I find the repeated example of the Harry Potter books amusing; I love them, but one of their great virtues is that they're so short. Sure, the page count is high, but they have gigantic font and huge spacing between lines. If you printed them in the same font that most of my other novels are printed, I doubt any of them would break 350.
Posted by: jadagul at May 1, 2007 2:26:06 PM
