Quote:
Originally Posted by Catlady
Do people have something against books with more than a hundred or so pages? I'm not fond of novellas or short stories. I want to read a book with some heft.
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As a general rule I am the same way - I much prefer "some heft" to a story - but there are exceptions.
Science fiction spent its adolescence in short format and still does some of its best work in that form. I'd love to see what Ted Chiang might achieve in a novel, so far that hasn't happened, but one of the reasons I recommended
Story of Your Life was precisely because it was science fiction that (I thought) would work for people that did not usually read science fiction.
And then there is the theme "the book came first". I went looking for great (IMO) stories that were well matched with great (IMO) movies. This almost insists that we look at novella or less, because any full length novel adapted to the screen tends to get hacked around a lot to make it fit. (eg:
Simon Birch vs
A Prayer for Owen Meany; or the
Lord of the Rings movies - well done, but not a good match to the books).
Story of Your Life, as a short story, actually gets expanded into the movie
Arrival (given greater physical and political context). But the movie retains the slightly confused feeling of the short story - a "why is he telling me this?" thing - up until the point when you discover it is all important and even the manner of the telling is relevant to the message of the story.
The Body, as a novella, makes it to the screen almost perfectly intact (well, some of Gordie's background is skimmed over). From the same collection
Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption also makes it to the screen extremely well, which seems to prove to me that a movie comes to around about a novella's worth of detail. (The fact that many YA novels have been made into movies merely proves my point.
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You are probably taking into consideration that our February book is also a novella. But in that case I'd say it was a matter of coincidence, although the fact that it was short also makes it an easy book to commit to which, as alluded to by others, has to help in a book club situation.