2023, books, Mysteries

Long and Short of It

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Several weeks back Linda (I believe it was Linda anyway) recommended The English Understand Wool. I don’t even remember what we were talking about but I thought the title sounded quirky so I looked it up on the library website.  It had a good-size waiting list and I noticed that the author was Helen DeWitt.  I almost didn’t request it because I remember how long DeWitt’s first book was… The Last Samurai… almost 600 pages and DENSE. 

The Last Samurai was enjoyable, although a little sad in some places.  I try not to let long tomes scare me off so I went ahead and clicked on the “Place Hold” button for Wool.   Imagine my surprise when I went to pick it up on Saturday… just 69 pages!  I read the whole thing in about an hour – so I read it again. 

I’m reading another fairly short book this week – The Pluto Files by Neil deGrasse Tyson.  I wasn’t sure how long it would be before I requested it (yes, I know I could look up page numbers on the library site if I wanted to….) but I would have guessed that it wouldn’t be too terribly long.  Neil’s books aren’t usually really long; I assume he works hard not to overwhelm his readers with all he knows. 

Not sure how long my upcoming requests will be but I feel like a massive tome would be OK since I’ve had a few short books in a row now.

Do you know the longest book you’ve ever read?

58 thoughts on “Long and Short of It”

  3. Possibly the longest book I’ve read twice, because there is so much to absorb is, at about 650 pages, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville by David S. Reynolds.

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  4. So how do you count Robert Caro’s biographies of Johnson? Technically it’s four separate books (five if you count the one he says he is still working on) but seems to be it’s just one LOOOONNNGG work. Wasband One was reading the first one The Power Broker in the last year of our marriage. Unfortunately wasband was a very slow reader and the book is quite long. I assume he eventually finished it.. don’t know if he kept going with the following books.

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    1. The Power Broker is about Robert Moses in New York City. I had it on my list of books I wanted to acquire and read but haven’t. At over a thousand pages it makes an unwieldy book, especially as a paperback.

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  6. Both “The Source” and “The Covenant” by James Michener clocked in at over 1000 pages. “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” clocked in at over 1500 pages. Herman Wouk’s “The Winds of War”and”War and Remembrance” were 1040 and 1300 pages respectively. I read all of those books quite a long time ago (decades). They were the 4″ X 7″ paperbacks that were over 2 inches thick with tiny printing. Much more recently, Ian W. Toll has written a lengthy trilogy on the WWII Pacific Theater starting with “Pacific Crucible” and ending with “Twilight of the Gods”. I still need to read the middle one, “The Conquering Tide”. I’ll probably eventually tackle the Lyndon Johnson biography.

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  7. I think it’s Ken Follett’s “Pillars of the Earth,” which is close to 1000 pages depending on the edition. I actually enjoyed it quite a bit but haven’t gotten around to the sequels yet.

    Follett’s “Fall of the Giants” is up there in length, too, and it was an equally enjoyable story.

    Which brings me to a nitpick I have as an author, and now as a publisher who formatted his latest book: Page counts.

    Page counts are the accepted way of determining a book’s length (and supposed difficulty in reading), but in the name of accuracy, I don’t care for it at all. Far too general and potentially misleading.

    When I was using Atticus software to format my book, “Little Mountain, Big Trouble,” which is about 51,000 words, I noticed that by changing the type size and/or the margins, I could add or subtract some 50 pages, which turns out to be more than a 20% difference from the final version, which is about 230 pages.

    Think of all those tiny little mass market paperbacks we bought (mostly back in the day but still available now) that came out after the hardcovers of bestsellers were published. The hardcovers might have been 300 pages, but the p-backs usually had close to twice as many pages. Remember how tiny the typeface was? How wide the margins were? How the p-backs often fell apart after a few readings because we had to pry them open so wide to read the inside edges of the text that the binding (cheap of course) came apart.

    Yes, I’ll agree that most books that are 5×8 or 6×9 formats with 11- or 12-point typeface and page counts are consistent enough to compare overall length, but not all pages are created equal. I’d much rather know how many words I’ll be reading, not how many pages.

    *End of mini-morning rant* 🙂

    Chris in Owatonna (who agrees that many long books read fast and just as many short books read slow-w-w-w)

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    1. There are many formatting decisions that affect page count. Type size, type style, line spacing, margins, page size, even to a minor extent the rules you set up for the type block justification. Those decisions also impact readability, which, for a reader is more important than page or word count. A publisher may make formatting decisions in the interest of economy that adversely affect the reader’s experience.

      It’s safe to say I’ve never chosen a book for its page or word count or been influenced by it, except where a formidable tome might prompt me to ask myself whether I was willing to invest the time.

      I don’t understand the point of your rant.

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      1. I just meant that some people are possibly deterred from reading a book if they think it’s too long because it has so many pages. My point was I get a much better feel for how long a book will take me to read if I know the word count, not the page count.

        Chris

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  10. I just went down a rabbit hole to find the word length for a few of the books I mentioned. “The Source” is about 276,000, “The Covenant” is about 312,000, and “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” is about 314, 250. “Pillars of the Earth” comes in at about 244,000.

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  11. I read Michener’s “Hawaii” when I was quite young, maybe 12. Interesting reading for one so young. My parents were absorbed with their own problems and barely noticed what I was reading. I stole it out of Dad’s closet, the top shelf where he kept stuff I wasn’t supposed to look at, like his handgun and his *ahem!* magazines. After that, I just kept reading Michener. His books tend to be long. Like others here, I read “The Covenant”. I doubt I will read them again but I don’t remember the plots from all of them anymore. I do remember “Hawaii” because it was the first time I read an adult novel. I never looked back at “My Friend Flicka” or the Black Stallion series again.

    Another long one is Steven King’s “The Stand.” Not the greatest good vs evil story ever written, I guess. Someone at work was reading it so I read it too.

    See, my problem is my memory. I am not at all organized when it comes to recording my reading. I don’t put it all on spreadsheets. I just read. If someone recommends a book, I read it. So, not too long ago, I listened to your recommendation for a book about the Arthurian legends from a woman’s perspective. It was quite a tome and probably one of the longest I have ever read. Can I remember the name? NO. Library apps would be so helpful if they could record a history of what a patron has read! I’ll think of it. I can remember neither the title nor the author, although I know it was a woman.

    “The Covenant of Water,” by Abraham Verghese, was somewhere around 700 pages. I don’t remember exactly. That’s the longest book most recently.

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      4. I’ve read Mists of Avalon twice. I read it when it came out and then read it again when I took History of King Arthur in English and American Lit.

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  13. My current text book for English class is over 2000 pages. With pages Like tissue paper. I hate it.

    The instructor has said the textbook she previously used, and liked, has gone out of
    Print, so this is a new one. I’m going to complain about it at the end of the course.

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  14. “Infinite Jest” by David Foster Wallace is probably the longest book that I have read. It’s roughly 1100 pages – if I remember correctly – quite the tome. The combination of the weight of the book and all of those footnotes in tiny print made for a difficult read for me, and it took me a very long time to get through it. It’s an interesting book, though, and I’d probably read it again on a Kindle.

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    1. I’ve had Infinite Jest out from the library twice, but never managed to start it, probably because it’s so daunting, before I have to take it back. One of these days…

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  15. If a book is long, my relationship with it will probably not be. I have a limited attention span, and if anything about the book or the author’s style irks me in the least, I give up on it.

    I think the longest nonfiction I’ve read might have been Robert Massie’s book on Peter the Great.

    As far as fiction, I do have a gift edition of the Lord of the Rings trilogy in one volume. The Once and Future King was also a trilogy in one volume, but even so it’s not all that long. Any extra credit if you’ve read a book more than once?

    Gravity’s Rainbow was a fail, and a pretty early one.

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    1. Yes! I think I have read the Tolkien trilogy three times. Forgive me, but I love it. All those elves and adventures, all the beautiful scenery (in my inner eye), Gandalf and Shadowfax, good and evil, resting with a good friend and sharing a meal and a pipe… I can’t resist it. I still imagine trees talking very slowly and stepping out of their places on branch-like legs.

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  16. I have read “The Source” three times over the years – first time in the 70’s, probably once in the 80’s and again in the 90’s. Not sure I’d want to wade through all that tiny print again.

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  18. Gone With the Wind was another novel I read multiple times. The estimated word count is 456,010. Loved the novel, though there are obviously troublesome attitudes expressed. I didn’t like the movie one bit. It seemed like all the best qualities of the novel were omitted from the movie, and its worst impulses were magnified and exalted.

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    1. I have also read Gone with the Wind a few times. One of my favorites. I like the movie but it’s hard to say what they should’ve lopped out to include more of the book considering that it’s Hollywood. However, having read the book, the movie doesn’t ring true at the very end. So many people leave the movie thinking that “tomorrow is another day” means that she’s going to get Rhett back if she just sleeps on it – when you read the book, you know that he is so done with her.

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