FOR READERS
Today’s reader topic comes from QSFer Denise Dechene:
I don’t read a book based on how long or short it is. That being said I know a lot of people do. Do you like short books long books or don’t care? If you only read a certain length, what’s your cut-off, and why?
Writers: This is a reader chat – you are welcome to join it, but please do not reference your own works directly. Thanks!
I generally dislike long books. It seems to have been the fashion since the late seventies for best-selling novelists to produce War and Peace length tomes – and the tendency has filtered down to the less-than-best-selling writers. I recently read a book review that called a 70K manuscript short. WTF? Let me say it: Size does not matter. Content matters. While I generally shy away from anything more than 300 pages or so, there have been some notable exceptions to my rule; Gone With the Wind and The Mandarins are prime examples. Simply, then, if I am engaged it does not matter if the book is short or long – but it takes a hell of a lot of talent to write a long book that deserves to be long. Length for the sake of length is never a good thing.
Well, in most cases.