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.

 

[Parmandur]

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

Nooooooo, the hand feel of a giant fat book is so delightful. The heft, the sensation of turning the pages. E-readers are souless, for me.

 

[Parmandur]

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.

Sure, different artworks. But don't sell pop songs short: KPop Demon Hunters, for example shoes the raw intense power a concise well done song can have, even if it is not Beethoven's 9th symphony.

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.

"Repition with difference" is one of the most fundamental cornerstones of literature as an artform: dull repition is bad, but properly done repition is sokw of the best stuff. For an example, in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, there are something like 90+ named and detailed Inns that various characters stay at over the course of the series. Jordan spend a lot of time and attention on these Inns, their staff, their food, their patrons. Now, Jordan was a food critic for a local newspaper before he wrote novels, so his descriptions are vivid and excellent. He uses the familiar rhythms of "they stay st an Inn and eat in the common room" to explore setting and character, and often to advance the plot. The repition with difference allows him to say so much, and build a really rich artistic expression.

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.

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...)

To put on a little Marxist critique hat, the swing of vook size has little to do with people's artistic preferences, and much more to do with the material economic conditions of the publishing industry and readership.

When cheap pulp books rose tonprominwnce in the 20th century, short vooks became popular to take adva tage of that.

The modern environment of ebooks and digital audiobooks, however, changes that.

I paid the exact same monetary price for the audiobooks of Pirenesi and Wind & Truth. While I don't begrudge that, paying the same price for a little under 7 hours enjoyment versus 63 hours of enjoyment is...stark. Sanderson himself has talked about how larger books are selling better and better because a lot of readers want that bang for their buck.

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.

The Great Gatsby is pretty good, but yes I could imagine it being better as a proper old school tome that gets into more detail.

I'm not saying all short novels are bad, but it has to be quite good like Pkrenesi or Great Gatsby to justify the sin of brevity.

 

[Mannahnin]

However, the lack of explanation for these contexts works against greater understanding of the tales herein. I don't just mean that there's no notations regarding terms that non-Aussies probably won't be familiar with, but also no indication of which tales are from which aboriginal tribes. The practical impact of this is that (barring instances where the name of the tribe is mentioned in the story, which is rare) we not only don't know which tales are from which people, but in several instances we end up with several incompatible stories for the same creation myth, such as when we have two different stories about how the tortoise got its shell within pages of each other.

The author's introduction makes it clear that he wasn't unaware of this problem, pointing out how there are several instances of stories having been passed between tribes, to the point where they're now identical or told only with minor variations between them. I'm sure that's the case, but is it really an excuse for giving nothing to connect the stories to the people who tell them? The more I read this, the more I recalled how much I appreciated the efforts of another author who, when writing a translation of a Chinese text, bent over backwards to give us notes and explanations. Would that had been the case here!

I still have my 1984 copy of Richard Erdoes' and Alphonso Ortiz' American Indian Myths & Legends, and it's pure gold. And one of the great things about it is that each tale specifies what tribe/people it comes from, where the authors heard it/got it from, and when.

 

[Mannahnin]

"Repition with difference" is one of the most fundamental cornerstones of literature as an artform: dull repition is bad, but properly done repition is sokw of the best stuff. For an example, in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, there are something like 90+ named and detailed Inns that various characters stay at over the course of the series. Jordan spend a lot of time and attention on these Inns, their staff, their food, their patrons. Now, Jordan was a food critic for a local newspaper before he wrote novels, so his descriptions are vivid and excellent. He uses the familiar rhythms of "they stay st an Inn and eat in the common room" to explore setting and character, and often to advance the plot. The repition with difference allows him to say so much, and build a really rich artistic expression.

A great example of how subjective tastes in art can be.

I first sampled Jordon's WoT in a novella included in the 1998 Legends anthology, and it was enough to convince me that his writing was a waste of my time. I've really loved some long works, though, including LotR, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, and the entire 20 book series of Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey/Maturin tales (though most of the individual installments are of short to moderate length). I've read Neil Stephenson's Baroque Cycle twice, and I've lost track of how many times I've read his Cryptonomicon. But length like that is IME infrequently necessary or justified.

 

[Parmandur]

A great example of how subjective tastes in art can be.

I first sampled Jordon's WoT in a novella included in the 1998 Legends anthology, and it was enough to convince me that his writing was a waste of my time. I've really loved some long works, though, including LotR, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, and the entire 20 book series of Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey/Maturin tales (though most of the individual installments are of short to moderate length). I've read Neil Stephenson's Baroque Cycle twice, and I've lost track of how many times I've read his Cryptonomicon. But length like that is IME infrequently necessary or justified.

Jordan was a master of languid, luxurious prose. Having met him and listened to him speak at length in person at a signing, he spoke exactly how he wrote (a trait I have often observed of major writers, like Martin, Sanderson, or Pratchett). Prose is an artform, and enjoyment of the actual words and flavor of the language is a major reason I read, as much as the content itself.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

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

The reason I got an eReader in the first place was the Wheel of Time series. Because back then I was still commuting to work and wouldn't have to schlep those books around. Not to mention, the amount of bookshelf space it saves.