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?
The post the ask@AAR: What’s the perfect length for a novel? appeared first on All About Romance.