I'll join the club of "Make it long please" here...
I don't think every books needs 1000+ pages, but some of the very best stories I've ever read (almost everything apart from Pratchett actually who writes perfect "short" books of 300 pages or less) are multi-volume and they need to be that way.
Robert Jordan is an extreme example. I like the WOT series and I have reread all the books at least twice and will reread the entire series at least one more, but the last volumes did have a slightly "stretched" feel to them.
My feeling is, that many books (especially Fantasy, and British fantasy above all) need a lot of pages to get the story going...and this is a good thing.
There is nothing I like more than a book that starts in some small village with everything being as it should be, people laughing, celebrating, doing small and unimportant things, a clean starting point from where a story full of adventure starts to roll out, slowly and then ever faster until it reaches the end after several unexpected twists and turns. The Lord of the Rings is actually a perfect example of what I expect a Fantasy book to be. The first chapters are almost totally meaningless, they do nothing but describe the scenery, a few characters and the general setting.
Remember the beginnign of "The Hobbit"?
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit...
Anything can happen, a beginning like that is just perfect.
Far too many stories start with something like:
"It was a dark and stormy night, bodies littered the battlefield and the crows were feasting..."
Pratchett would follow that sentece with some something witty about eyeballs...
