I wanted to answer the question I posed above, honestly, I really did. But sadly, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I couldn’t.<\/p>\n
It all began with a column by Daniel Grossman in the May 5, 2008 issue of Publishers Weekly<\/i>. He commented on the recently canceled Quill Awards, and suggested several humorous category expansions which might have kept up interest in the Quill concept had they been implemented. Some of his suggestions included “Best Memoir by Aging Rock Star Who Couldn’t Possibly Have Remembered Half the Things Written About,” “Best Children’s Book by Celebrity Who Wants to Be Known as an Author but Lacks the Wherewithal to Actually Write a Novel,” and “Most Overhyped Book Whose Advance Never Came Close to Earning Out.”<\/p>\n
But the one that spoke to me the most was:<\/p>\n
Best 1,000-Page Novel That Should Have Been a 200-Page Novel<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I would probably have pushed that idea even further, since often, when reading a long novel (or trying<\/i> to real a long novel), I don’t think about how much better it would have been as a shorter novel but instead how much better it would have been as 7,500-word short story! I often find myself thinking, would you just get on with it already!<\/i> And so I thought I’d write here about the recent long novels I’d read that seemed a waste of space, and how they could have accomplished what they’d set out to do with far fewer pages, naming names and letting the chips fall where they may.<\/p>\n
And then I realized—I can’t! I’ve been so burned by long books clumsily written and pointlessly plotted that I’ve self-selected them out of my reading. It’s been years since I’ve attempted anything epic. One of the few long novels worthy of its length is John Crowley’s Little Big<\/i>, which has the poetry, polish and precision of the best short fiction, and that sets an extremely high bar for what I expect out of a long novel. Since the thought of diving into most long books leaves me with that sinking feeling you get when an after-dinner speaker informs you in advance that he’ll be talking for four hours, I tend to stick with shorter works. My heart has always belonged to the short story.<\/p>\n
Which means that as I look back at my reading list from 2007, I see that I mostly read magazines, anthologies, and collections, and the few novels that I did read—which included titles such as The Accidental Time Machine<\/i> by Joe Haldeman (288 pages), Harm<\/i> by Brian Aldiss (240 pages), and Breakfast with the Ones You Love<\/i>, by Eliot Fintushel (288 pages)—were for the most part compact, and written by authors whom I’d first admired for their short fiction. The longest work I read was Axis<\/i> by Robert Charles Wilson (368 pages).<\/p>\n
So it turns out that though I have the willingness, I’m not really the right person to answer the question I posed as the title to this entry, since based on my reading list, I’ve long retired from reading bugcrushers. One of you with more stomach for plowing through supersized novels will have to take up the task on my behalf.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I wanted to answer the question I posed above, honestly, I really did. But sadly, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I couldn’t. It all began with a column by Daniel Grossman in the May 5, 2008 issue of Publishers Weekly. He commented on the recently canceled Quill Awards, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12874"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12874\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12876,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12874\/revisions\/12876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}