Jen at Crazy for Books restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another, but then couldn't continue, so she handed the hosting responsibilities off to Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them.
This week Billy asks: If you see a book you like but see it is 400 or 500+ pages, will you still read it?
Yes, I would still read the book. The blunt truth is that it would be difficult to read most modern fantasy and science fiction if one was not willing to read four-, five-, or even six-hundred page books on a regular basis. For fantasy fiction, it is not entirely shocking to find novels that are even longer - eight-hundred, nine-hundred, or even thousand page novels show up often enough in the current era of "doorstop fantasy books" that they aren't really that remarkable any more. And the sad fact is that science fiction novels are creeping up on fantasy in this regard, getting longer and longer in recent years. I suspect that it will not be all that long before science fiction novels catch up with their fantasy cousins in terms of expected length.
I will say that I'm not entirely happy with this state of affairs. The steady growth in size of both fantasy and science fiction novels hasn't really made them better, just longer. Some novels are improved with more length, but a lot of modern novels could probably be dramatically improved if an editor trimmed them by tens of thousands of words. Sadly, I don't really envision this trend reversing any time soon, but at the very least there are hundreds of older genre novels I haven't gotten to yet if I ever want to read something in the two- or three-hundred page range.
Previous Book Blogger Hop: 103 Is the Twenty-Seventh Prime Number
Subsequent Book Blogger Hop: 105 Is Part of a Ruth-Aaron Pair With 104
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The length of the book doesn't really matter, as long as the book is interesting enough :)
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@Nyze Gremio-Velasco: A long book can be enjoyable. The problem with a lot of long books is that they are needlessly long, and would be improved with some editing to pare their length down.
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