Increasingly, the short novel seems to me to be the ideal literary form for our tired, distracted but still story-hungry age.
The above is from a recent column by Margaret Renkl, a regular guest columnist at the New York Times. I’ve read that our attention spans are shrinking and are, perhaps, more than 30% shorter than they were twenty years ago.
I bristle to think that’s true of me and yet… I’m sure it is. (I’m working on it!)
It is certainly true that my interest in very long books has dropped over the past decades. Today, if a book’s over 500 pages, I’m less inclined to lose myself in its pages. It took me months to finish The Covenant of Water in part because I kept stopping to read something else as I made my way through its 775 pages.
When I look at my top reads of 2024, the longest was 490 pages and a few were closer to 300. My favorite novel of the year is just 320 pages long!
What are you reading? Do you love to lose yourself in a giant dense novel? Or are you gravitating towards punchier readers? Both? And if you do still read very big books, do you have a strategy?
It’s hard for me to judge how many “pages” are in 95% of the fiction I read because I read it on my kindle and the pagination does not match a hard copy. In hard form, for me, romantic fiction of around 300 pages is about right and up to 400 pages would be fine if the author was keeping my attention and using the extended page length to round and flesh out her characters. Badly or minimally developed characters or simplistic plots shoehorned into a short format will quickly lose my interest.
On the other hand, my copy of Diana Gabaldon’s “A Breath of Snow and Ashes” (part of the Outlander series) comes in at 1,390 pages (paperback form) and I lapped up every word. I have also read “War and Peace” (on my kindle) and lost not only the plot but the number of pages. I persisted and read it in full but can’t say I really enjoyed its very long, often tedious length. It got to the point that I reformatted my kindle to tell me how much (percentage) of the book was left in an effort to cheer myself up.
I read almost exclusively romance this year, so that’s what’s included here.
I don’t generally pay attention to page numbers, especially with the books I listen to instead of read. I did a fly-by sampling of books I’ve read this year and discounting the novellas they range from low to mid 200’s up to 550 pages. I’d say the majority I checked (very unscientific mind you) were in the 300 to 400 page range. Two books I looked at were over 500, pages, which surprised me because I don’t remember thinking they were longer than average. They both got B’s from me. Some of the less than 300 page books dragged and felt like forever…
The audiobooks are more difficult to assess, because I have this habit of listening to just about every audiobook on 1.2X speed. Normal speed seems to drag for me. Again discounting novellas, it seems most of the books are in the 7 to 11 hour range, with some going over 12 hours (although, again, I speed it up a bit).
So I can say with commendable waffling, that my sweet spot seems to be the books that keep me interested, whether they are novellas or 550+ page books. But overall I’m not reading epic tales these days, and the average length is probably 350-ish range (just a guess…).
I don’t generally consider page length when choosing a book – as 90% of the books I read are for review, it doesn’t much matter if they’re 200 pages or 500 pages. I only start looking if the book isn’t very good and I want to know how much longer I have to go!
I also read exclusively on a Kindle, so page counts aren’t always accurate and again, most ARCs aren’t formatted that way – I have a rough idea of what length a book will be by its location numbers, and I think most are, like Carrie, in the 300-400 page range. In fact, my Goodreads Year in Books says the average length of the books I read this year was 300 pages, but that can’t include audiobooks (which are often listed as having “11 pages”).
I’ve read door-stops in the past – but not recently. Ultimately, as long as a book holds my interest, it’s all good – I won’t notice the pages flying by when I’m completely gripped by the story, and conversely, can get bored by a 100 page novella when it’s not good.
I have no problem with long mysteries or thrillers that are plot-heavy (same with long mystery or non-fiction audiobooks) but long romances rarely work for me. There’s no reason to have a contemporary romance in particular go over 400 pages except for a lack of editing. I don’t know how many romances I have skimmed to the end of or just abandoned because I’ve had enough of these characters and I feel that their relationship has already reached a place where the book can end any time now.
If a kindle romance is over 400 pages I just don’t bother starting it anymore, regardless of great reviews or whether I’ve enjoyed that author in the past. Penny Reid and Brigham Vaughn are good examples of this: smooth writing and interesting scenarios but my God can they drag a story out until I’m begging it to end.
Bottom line: It’s not that I don’t have the attention span, rather my reading time is too valuable to waste on authors’ self-indulgence.
I would love to sink into a long, absorbing historical novel (or any other kind of novel) with interesting characters and an absorbing plot. Lately I’ve been more likely to encounter a book that’s padded to reach 250 pages with clichéd characters and a nonsensical plot. It’s been depressing.
I keep a spreadsheet of ebooks I buy. One of the columns is estimated reading time, which I included when I started the spreadsheet because of my long-term preference to read books I can finish the same day I start them. I finally broke that habit in recent years because longer books kept piling up in the tbr backlog, but it does give me some numbers for book length. Ebooks I’ve read range from a 7-page short-short with a 12-minute estimated reading time to a 2,882-page box set with a 54-hour estimated reading time.
For all 5,000+ in the subset of the list that I’ve read, the mean & median are both 5.4 hours. For the romances, the mean is 5.5 hours. For the F&SF, the mean is 7.4 hours. For the litrpg subset of F&SF (my current main consumer of reading time), the mean is 12 hours. I’ve had more than one litrpg series take all my available reading time for a week or more.