What are you reading in 2025?

[Retros_x]

No more paradoxical than preferring to listen to a symphony over pop songs. Pop songs cam be great, but they cannot engender the experience of Beethoven's 9th or Dvorak's 6th.

I think the comparison doesn't work completely for me, because I enjoy music in a very different way than written content. I want to say though, that most pop music is short and shallow, something I did put in my ranking below long and deep.

But ok I get it, you want length no matter what. Its about the jorney, even if the journey could be much shorter and without repititions. But you want to see every tree in the forest. Its hard for me to grasp it, but I have to accept it.

 

[Retros_x]

As a result fantasy, which was once my favorite genre, has largely been abandoned since the genre seems reluctant to move past the doorstopper which is always part of a series of equally long books

Even if @Parmandur will suffer, I really hope that the trend for fantasy books to become longer and longer will stop and reverse at some time. Most of them are just too long. They think they are Tolkien or Martin, but they are not and its just a slog to read them.

A Game of Thrones is 720 pages long.

GoT is one of the rare examples of the genre where I feel the length is completely justified. On no single page I thought about boredom or repetition. The complex net of characters and worldbuilding needs the length, but the book is not just about that. I hate boring worldbuilding exercises in a novel where I get the feel I read a wiki article. But every chapter in GoT some exciting plot development or character interactions happen. It has a great pacing and is one of the few examples of high page number but deep content in the fantasy genre for me.

(but also in terms of modern fantasy novel 720 pages is almost considered short, so maybe thats why I like it so much...)

 

[Retros_x]

Whereas I am frequently left wanting more.

Ok I have one last question, because you liked the comment where it was stated that The Great Gatsby is one of the best novels of all time and it is short. Do you think The Great Gatsby would've been even better if Fitzgerald would've bloated the novel to 800 pages? Or just never trimmed it down, because most novelist end up with a longer draft that they trim down to get the length that gets printed.

 

[Autumnal]

This is one big reason I love ebooks. I can just set the font, size, kerning, leading, justification, etc however I want.

This is why they’ve become essential for me, or at least the #1 reason for it. My brain is finicky, and too many fine books on my shelves tsk literally 5-10 times longer to read then the same text in a configured-for-Bruces reader.

And they make those 1000 page tomes much more enjoyable because you only have the weight of your e-reader!

My Kindle library runs to several thousand volumes, about half of which are downloaded onto my Paperwhite, sorted into about 30 collections. (A few collections come and go as I work out what sort things my subconscious want to lump and what it wants to split.) my phone has a few hundred downloads st any given moment. I love this power more than I can say.

GoT is one of the rare examples of the genre where I feel the length is completely justified.

Agreed. Martin has fe peers but k that particular regard. For me, that would start with Dan Simmons and Christopher Ruocchio coming to mind immediately and then I’d have to think about it. Maybe Jacqueline Carey.