Good riddance to long books | Hacker News Reader

Good riddance to long books

spectator.co.uk

24 pointslermontov57 comments

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I understand that Dumas was paid by the word, which explains the flowery dialogue in books like The Three Musketeers.

”I have a question.”

“Please, unburden yourself, so that I may satisfy your ardent curiosity.”

“It is, but a simple question; a humble question. One that I am ashamed to admit I have no satisfactory answer.”

“Do not feel shame. Please, allow me to provide you with some surcease.”

“Very well, then. This is my simple, humble question.”

“Please, I am afire with anticipation, that I may bring enlightenment to you.”

“Very well then. My question, humble as it is, is…Do you know when dinner is served?”

That exchange in all its aristocratic floridness brings to mind a scene with my favorite phrase from another work that was paid-per-word:

"The leprosy of unreality disfigured every human creature in attendance upon Monseigneur." - A Tale of Two Cities

Just to be clear: That exchange was not a direct quote, but many exchanges like that, can be found.

I tried reading some of Steven Brust's Khaavren Romances[0], where he adopts a similar writing style, but couldn't make it through them. I did like his Vlad Taltos[1] books, which are written in a much more "vernacular" style.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khaavren_Romances

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Brust#The_Dragaeran_boo...

This reminds me of the classic TCP vs UDP joke

I recently wrote a science fiction novel that I intentionally kept short (50,000 words - 200 pages- readable in a weekend). When reading, I don't finish most of what I start because it takes 80-100 pages to get to the hook. I understand that there is a joy in reading a long novel that builds up a character, but most of the time these novels are just tedious. I couldn't finish the 2020 Hugo Award winner because for the first 50 pages it was the protagonist moving into an apartment, unpacking stuff and walking around in a city. It kills me.

What really winds me up is when you have 1000 pages of book (or even 3000 pages of series) and then the ending drops in 50 pages.

Looking at you Peter F. "A god turned up and fixed everything lol" Hamilton, but it seems to happen a lot in sci-fi, maybe because the author prefers worldbuilding to a satisfying plot resolution.

Though I think in some cases the publisher puts their foot down and tells the author that the N-logy ends here and there's not going to be a N+1th volume, so the author just slaps a desultory ending on it and ships it.

> I couldn't finish the 2020 Hugo Award winner because for the first 50 pages it was the protagonist moving into an apartment, unpacking stuff and walking around in a city.

That would be "A Memory Called Empire". I really enjoyed that book. Sure, you could boil it down to moving into an apartment... From having lived on a space station to an alien world, as a new ambassador, dumped into intrigue. That's quite a lot of unpacking.

The poster missed out on quite a barn burner of a middle and finish in A Memory Called Empire, and the sequel A Desolation Called Peace, which also won the Hugo Award.

I want to mix you and Neal Stephenson in a room, unlimited ink (toner too if you sweet talk me), and a large extra cheese from Uncle Enzo's.

Seems weird to get hung up over the number of words and page. Pretty sure your 200 pages could bore me to death as well.

harder

100%. I think the same thing for many technical books.

My pet peeve with technical books is unintentional filler - things you can learn within minutes by googling it and easily amount to 50%+ of most books. Show me the obscure API workarounds and tricks that will take me weeks to find out instead.

Ever notice how books seem to be the same size? But taking a closer look, the font sizes vary, the line spacing varies, the margin width varies, even the thickness of the paper varies quite a bit.

This means the actual word count varies quite a bit. Page count is not a good indicator.

A book should be as long as the content merits. A lot of self-help books in the 200-300 page range (including index, notes, etc.) could be summed up in a decently long blog post. A lot of history books & biographies feel as though they skimp out on some important stuff even after 500-600+ pages. Lord of the Rings could keep going and and I would keep going on along with it.

> A book should be as long as the content merits. A lot of self-help books in the 200-300 page range (including index, notes, etc.) could be summed up in a decently long blog post.

People repeat that all the time, but I'm skeptical. I think a "summing up" would likely be less effective or persuasive than some version of the full, "repetitious" book. Repetition is usually key to actually absorbing and idea. Also, a particular formulation of an idea is unlikely to connect with every person, so if an author wants to connect with the maximum number of people, they would have to express the same idea in different ways. It's not like a book can customize itself to its reader, so every reader is exposed to all those versions, including the ones that don't connect especially well with them.

-----

I present you: The Hacker News Self-Help Guide to Weight-loss:

Eat less food. Exercise more. Any reasonably competent person should be able to figure out the rest from those key ideas.

Fair point, but I think your example falls on the other end of the extreme – lacking context. A sufficiently long blog post – or, better yet, a drip campaign from a newsletter over the course of a week or something and narrowly focused on a particular topic – would be able to provide context for why.

Of course, you're putting a bit of money into a book so you might be more willing to follow that advice.

All that said, I have read plenty of self-help books and I enjoy the anecdotes. IF they do help someone written as they are, more power to their authors and may that trend continue.

Malcom Gladwell books are like this. He started out as a magazine writer and was excellent at it, his New Yorker articles are delightful. When he started writing books they just ended up being the ideas of a magazine article in book length.

This is why I find Outliers incredibly overrated. The core idea is fine, quite good even. But the fact that the book is 336 pages when it could probably be 20-50 at the most just kills the joy of reading it.

I admit that extremely detailed histories and biographies are mostly not my thing either, but there's definitely a class of books including self-help but also a lot of business books that are built around a few (or even just one) core idea. Even if fleshing out the idea beyond an article or a blog post adds color, it often really doesn't need the 250-300 pages that the publishing industry essentially requires.

I heard one author of a business book say his book was a page of content, and 200 pages of stories just to get people to read it.

The profit motive incentivizes us to never say anything in five pages that we can get away with stretching to 5 500-page volumes.

The Lord of the Rings trilogy was worth every word.

Respectfully disagree.

At the very least from what I recall there are sections of songs and poems which made my eyes glaze over and just skip.

I think one of the best things the LotR films did was to distill the story down into its best parts. The hobbit kinda did the opposite which is why they were, as enjoyable films, comparative failures.

My problem with the songs is that, how on earth can they be songs without any indication of how they’re meant to sound? My internal monologue tries to apply rhythm and it just makes for awkward reading.

That said, the only poetry I really get anything out of is John Cooper Clarke, and I’ve heard him perform and so have a very clear mental sound of how the poem should be delivered. So maybe it’s just me.

> At the very least from what I recall there are sections of songs and poems which made my eyes glaze over and just skip.

I felt the same way the first time I read the books. But the more I re-read and understand about Tolkien's worldbuilding the more I particularly appreciate them. The culture of Middle Earth is passed down by song and poetry, and when songs show up in the books they aren't just random interjections of the author but strands of culture connecting the characters.

If Tolkien had sprinkled more of the content of the Simirilion throughout LotR a lot of the meanings and symbolism would have been made more clear, but I don't think it would have been as immersive. The enjoyable thing about Tolkien is that he balances giving you enough explicit detail to follow and enjoy the main narrative, while also giving you a breadcrumbs that reveal the complex cosmology that contextualizes everything and is in the back of every characters mind.

Jackson's "enhancements" to The Hobbit were failures because he wasn't a good storyteller. He turned it into a Disneyland ride. You can see that in other Jackson movies, like "King Kong".

Jackson needs a Paul McCartney to tell him "no, take this scene out, and that one, and that one."

On the bottom of page 559 in my edition, there's a "little" I could have done without. Other than that, it was pretty good.

(I actually just read the bottom sentence on like 50 pages trying to find something, and damn if I couldn't actually really find a word that was not needed or useful.)

I feel largely the same about video games and TV (less so movies because it’s rare to even reach the 3 hour mark).

I love games I can finish and fully digest in a session or two, and I’d prefer a TV show end on a high with more still in the barrel, than fizzle out into drawn-out mediocrity.

Part of it is limited free time around work and general life stuff, but the volume and accessibility of media these days is definitely a factor. I’d be far more inclined to play a 150 hour RPG if I didn’t have dozens of other games I’d like to play.

> ...I’d prefer a TV show end on a high with more still in the barrel, than fizzle out into drawn-out mediocrity.

Except the TV show traditionally exists to get you to watch ads. A network that did what you ask would be a failure, because it would have fewer ad slots to sell.

Have you perhaps heard of the BBC?

I agree in principle, but there are exceptions to that rule. Lonesome Dove, the example he uses in that article, is one of those exceptions. He clearly hadn't read the book before writing the piece, and now I'm waiting for a retraction along the lines of "I was so wrong, I wish there was twice as much of this amazing book."

But yeah, in general, I think most books could be shorter and still be as effective, often moreso.

One thousand percent agree. I can't even bring myself to finish Streets of Laredo because I cannot say goodbye to the world McMurtry created. I haven't teared up at a book since I was a kid, but Lonesome Dove made it happen. I feel like all I've wanted to do since finishing Lonesome Dove in July... is talk about Lonesome Dove. It catapulted itself into my top 3 books list. I have to re-read Anna Karenina to decide which is better at this point. I wish Lonesome Dove was 1500+ pages.

Yeah, I think his dismissal of the book in the article is pretty typical of people's approach before they read it:

> I’m simply not sure I have the will to face 839 pages of cowboys by an author I don’t know.

I don't blame him, I was the same way, but that book subverts expectations in the best possible way. The reason it won a Pulitzer despite having the baggage of being a "cowboy book" in the world of literary novels was because it's an undeniable artistic achievement, full stop. Part of that achievement is sustaining its effect throughout an epic length. In other words, the page count is a feature rather than a bug.

Someone should inform Brandon Sanderson of this trend

I haven't read any of his, but I know he co-wrote the final 3 books of Wheel of Time, so presumably his mentor was Robert Jordan.

As I begin book 6 of Wheel of Time, I wonder if I'll have the perseverance to finish.

You could just skip the bulk of books 7-10 and put yourself on track to finishing. I just skimmed the eventful parts of them and I didn't miss much after starting Knife of Dreams.

While I don't avoid long books I would take the "life's too short" mentality when it comes to the entire Wheel of Time series.

I've heard 7-10 referred to as "the slog." It definitely slows down a bit, but I still enjoyed them. There's a lot of character development that you don't really recognize is even happening until later.

Oof, Wheel of Time really drags in the middle there! I almost threw in the towel several times. Fortunately, though, when Brandon takes over the pacing really picks up and it does have a satisfying conclusion!

That was my introduction to Brandon Sanderson as well, and since then I've now read the original Mistborn trilogy and what's published so far of Stormlight Archive. If you've made it through 5 books of Wheel of Time - whether or not you finish it - I think you might appreciate those.

You know what they say happens when you assume? It's true of presuming too.

> In December 2007 Brandon was chosen by Harriet McDougal Rigney to complete Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series after his untimely passing.

Ah, it didn't happen the way I thought it might have. So perhaps he was selected for having a similar style of long-winded writing?

He was selected (reported by him) for the eulogy he wrote for Robert Jordan on his blog. At the time he hadn't published "thousand pages" books. Though he later did, concurrently with writing the final Wheel of Time books (themselves thousand pages tomes).

And having read both of those authors, I really couldn't accuse Sanderson of being as long winded as Jordan. Sanderson's chapters (even in his long books) are bite sized and very comfortable for me, since that means I only remember the chapter number and don't use a bookmark. (often upward of 70 chapters for his Stormlight Archives series, which means less than 15 pages per chapters)

It should also be noted that Sanderson writes taking into account that readers can probably use a wiki to remember things, while Jordan keeps repeating things. Those books (while only a few months apart) weren't written for the same iternet era.

Uh... why would they do that? He was selected because of his love and appreciation for the source material, as well as being a brilliant and capable fantasy writer himself.

Finish it. You'll be sad when it's over.

After the weird and constant describing of women in flowery dresses admiring themselves in dreamscapes and book of weird lady attempting to drug and rape one of the main characters "as a joke!" I realized that this guy was way too horny and not nearly as interested in writing a good book series as everyone had told me.

Robert Jordan was notoriously bad at writing women and the... physical descriptions are pretty bad, but to his credit, women in his books are not second class citizens. Some of the most interesting, influential and powerful characters are women.

This is a seriously braindead take.

There's short books that feel interminable and long books that fly by.

It's amazing that a professional writer would espouse the opinion in this article publicly.

Nah, there is an actual tendency to make books longer for no good reason.

You usual target a wordcount for a market, as I understand it. You can't sell (to a publisher, I mean) a YA book that's 600 pages in a mass market paperback. You can't sell a 220 page hardcover to a publisher that wants big fat doorstop fantasy novels.

That only means publishers are accomplices.

They do that because they think it's what will sell. They might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure they have better insight into the market than I do.

Lack of editors has been a common problem for decades, especially visible as authors get famous.

> There's short books that feel interminable and long books that fly by.

Yeah: It was a delight to read. The Brothers Karamazov was a pain.

OK, but he should definitely read "Lonesome Dove". It's a great book and not tough going at all.

I loved it too. But somehow I wish he'd ended it there, and I never had to know how Woodrow dies. The book didn't need to be shorter, but the rest of the series may have diminished it. I feel that way about Dune too.

On the other hand I'm a fiend for the real long-form, like the Aubrey-Maturin series, a novel in twenty-one volumes. That kind of seemlessness is rare. McMurtry killed his Maturin in volume one. The rest felt like post script.

What a ridiculous opinion. shrug Love long books, sometimes wish a book would not end and re-read some of my favorites constantly. Last book took me 3 months to read. Enjoyed every word.

I love long books just fine. Like "Mission Earth" by Ron Habbard or "A Song of Ice and Fire" by George Martin or Asimov etc. etc

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