Yes, a real issue. I'm looking at my Elric books (admittedly just some novellas in book form) and they are skinny! So skinny.
What are you reading in 2023?
- Thread starter Ralif Redhammer
- Start date
To quote myself, I've got three unpublished books (either done or started), and making them short is HARD work! So much to say......
overgeeked
Open-World Sandbox
Yeah, it's a real thing. A lot of it is down to style differences over the years. Back-in-the-day telling was more accepted. Today telling is almost considered a sin. So instead of the author writing "Jack was mad," the author now has to write a long description of Jack being mad. Pounding their fist on something, turning red in the face, describe their heart rate going up, etc. So things get long winded quick. There's also a modern push for more dialog, less narration, and more character depth, which also make things expand. You see the same in comic books. It's called "decompressed storytelling." Instead of telling a pulse-pounding tale in 1-2 issues, everything's at least a graphic novel, so what would be a thin short story is expanded and expanded to fill out 6+ issues. It's kinda weird.
ALL the advice I get is "show, don't tell", so yes, that's a big part of it!
Ralif Redhammer
Legend
Absolutely. What's the saying "All killer, no filler?" That being said, there certainly are some books that justify their beefy page count.
Another thing to keep in mind, though, is that another reason is that paperback binding wasn't as advanced back then, and so they could only reliably bind X amount of pages. That also kept the page count down.
Speaking of all this, I just finished Moorcock's The Quest for Tanelorn. Dang, what a read! The ending is easily up there with Stormbringer's ending.
Now I'm starting Fredric Brown's What Mad World. With this, I have now read at least something by every single author listed in Appendix N.
Eyes of Nine
Everything's Fine
Thought I'd cross post my shelfie post from yesterday. Lots of fiction books on there, and several of the shelves are entirely devoted to my "To Read" bookshelves.
Fiction novels - I sell/trade to used bookstores or give away after I'm done reading them. So most of my non-to-read shelves have game books on them and little to no fiction
www.enworld.org
Fiction novels - I sell/trade to used bookstores or give away after I'm done reading them. So most of my non-to-read shelves have game books on them and little to no fiction
Show me your Shelfie!
www.enworld.org
I was on a week-long business trip this week, so I got through two novels, start to finish.
The first was Diablo Mesa by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, and I'm happy to report with this one they're back on form. It's a novel about an archaeological dig in the "Area 51" Groom Lake area, and it's part murder mystery, part police (or FBI) procedural, and dips heavily into both the thriller and science fiction realms by the end. A very good read.
Sadly, not so much for the second book I brought along: Ruthless, by Lisa Jackson, an author whose works I've enjoyed in the past. Ruthless is actually three of her early novels: With No Regrets, Double Exposure, and D is for Dani's Baby. I finished the first novel on the plane on the way home today, and much to my great disappointment, it barely even qualified as a thriller - seriously, I think if I had to plunk it into a genre, it would best fit as "romance novel" - not at all my cup of tea, and not something I would have brought as my primary form of entertainment for a week-long business trip. There was still about an hour left on my flight when I finished With No Regrets, but I was so disinterested in starting up the second novel and hoping for the best that I opted to put it away and mess around with a book of "Star Battles" (a puzzle book dealing with placing X number of "stars" in a grid such that there are X number of stars in each row, each column, and each bordered-off shape, with none of the stars touching each other).
When I got home, I placed Ruthless back on my "to be read" shelf for a future time when I'm desperate and willing to give it a try. In the meantime, I'm going back to my Conan compilation (a book much too large to make for easy packing and airplane reading).
Johnathan
The first was Diablo Mesa by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, and I'm happy to report with this one they're back on form. It's a novel about an archaeological dig in the "Area 51" Groom Lake area, and it's part murder mystery, part police (or FBI) procedural, and dips heavily into both the thriller and science fiction realms by the end. A very good read.
Sadly, not so much for the second book I brought along: Ruthless, by Lisa Jackson, an author whose works I've enjoyed in the past. Ruthless is actually three of her early novels: With No Regrets, Double Exposure, and D is for Dani's Baby. I finished the first novel on the plane on the way home today, and much to my great disappointment, it barely even qualified as a thriller - seriously, I think if I had to plunk it into a genre, it would best fit as "romance novel" - not at all my cup of tea, and not something I would have brought as my primary form of entertainment for a week-long business trip. There was still about an hour left on my flight when I finished With No Regrets, but I was so disinterested in starting up the second novel and hoping for the best that I opted to put it away and mess around with a book of "Star Battles" (a puzzle book dealing with placing X number of "stars" in a grid such that there are X number of stars in each row, each column, and each bordered-off shape, with none of the stars touching each other).
When I got home, I placed Ruthless back on my "to be read" shelf for a future time when I'm desperate and willing to give it a try. In the meantime, I'm going back to my Conan compilation (a book much too large to make for easy packing and airplane reading).
Johnathan
Old Fezziwig
Thanks for the sour persimmons, cousin.
I'm reading Nine Princes in Amber, which I've never read before. It's a fun read, but there's a point around the sixth chapter where Corwin says, "Wish in one hand and do something else in the other, and squeeze them both and see which comes true." Now, I'll grant that I'm carrying some of my own baggage here, as I can't stand this saying to begin with, but the prudery of this formulation put me up a tree last night when I read it.
Old Fezziwig
Thanks for the sour persimmons, cousin.
I've always kind of felt like no great book is too long, and no terrible book is too short. There are the great masses in the middle where they're good or bad but too long or too short (agreed on the Daevabad Trilogy, @Croesus; it really meanders and lingers in some places), and there are some books that are great but wouldn't be improved by adding more — like, I don't feel like The Sun Also Rises would be improved by being 800 pages.
WayneLigon
Adventurer
Finishing up Elizabeth Bear's Lotus Kingdoms series. It's a great ride, with multiple viewpoints across three major factions. There are some interesting ideas for D&D magic, since we get 3-4 different schools of thought on what magic is and how it works and where the power of a wizard comes from, sometimes all talking in the same room and comparing notes. You could almost look at each school like a class, with them going 'well, I can't do that, but I can do this other thing, here'. We get a couple of gods and dragons thrown into the mix, giving me some different and interesting ways of portraying such beings the next time I use one in a game.
Best of all, though, are the little worldbuilding touches of culture and custom that Bear weaves into all the characters and their scenes. Like mentioning that peasants nibble the rims of their unfired clay cups, or the differences in foods between the realms we visit. The stark differences in how the cities of Sarathai-lea and Saratha-tia smell and look; small things like the running child's sandals don't raise dust in the streets of rich and prosperous trade city of Sarathai-lea because the streets are swept frequently.
Best of all, though, are the little worldbuilding touches of culture and custom that Bear weaves into all the characters and their scenes. Like mentioning that peasants nibble the rims of their unfired clay cups, or the differences in foods between the realms we visit. The stark differences in how the cities of Sarathai-lea and Saratha-tia smell and look; small things like the running child's sandals don't raise dust in the streets of rich and prosperous trade city of Sarathai-lea because the streets are swept frequently.
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