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Originally Posted by Worldwalker
Maybe it's because I grew up reading 70-80,000 word (or shorter) novels, both those current at the time and the older books I haunted used book stores to get, but to me, a lot of modern novels are tedious and repetitive. Okay, you've spent five pages telling me about this character's apartment, but when is he going to do something?
Maybe I'm weird. I don't want to get to know characters; they're not my imaginary friends (just Laurell K. Hamilton's). I just want to see them doing exciting things. Would Little Fuzzy have been better with a few dozen pages added about Jack Holloway's introspection? Would meticulous descriptions of everything in sight have improved Needle? Is At the Mountains of Madness really too short?
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It depends on what I'm in the mood for... sometimes I want what I'll call a "light, quick read", which is what you've described above. Mostly I like long books where I really get to know the characters. Though I wholeheartedly agree that I don't want to be told everything about a character's apartment. It needs to be seamless world building, not "here, let me tell you everything in an infodump".
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Originally Posted by Worldwalker
Frankly, I think most 160,000 page novels are 80,000 page novels in dire need of a good editor.
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I can't really disagree with that
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Originally Posted by Worldwalker
But that is, of course, just one reader's opinion. What I'm hoping for, in the coming of ebooks, is authors who recognize that people like me exist and will write books that we want to buy, as well as the ones with the half-million-word tomes that we read with such reluctance. There's a place for both, even if that place isn't on a bookshelf where it's to a publisher's advantage to elbow books by other publishers off the most visible space.
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Agreed. I'd love to see a resurgence of novellas.