Open Thread: Too Long, Too Short?
Name a Book That Dragged on Too Long—or Ended Too Soon
Earlier this year I read Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy. My copy contained all three volumes in one. It was over eleven hundred pages, but I didn’t mind for a moment; the book blew breezily by. Meanwhile, every time I see Simon Sebag Montefiore’s The World: A Family History on the shelf, I think about those thirteen hundred pages and feel demoralized, like a man gazing up the craggy inclines of Everest, realizing he didn’t bring enough rope.
It’s a subjective judgment, but some books are simply too long, while others end too soon.
When C.S. Lewis released his final volume of the Space Trilogy in 1945, readers instantly recognized a difference between it and the first two in the series. That Hideous Strength is considerably longer than either Out of the Silent Planet or Perelandra.
It wasn’t long before Lewis created an abridged version of the book, retitled The Tortured Planet, to more closely match the length of the first two novels and better appeal to the American market (we apparently had diminished attention spans three quarters of a century ago, too).
“In reducing the original story to a length suitable for this edition,” Lewis explained in the preface, “I believe I have altered nothing but the tempo and the manner. I myself prefer the more leisurely pace—I would not wish even War and Peace or The Faerie Queene any shorter—but some critics may well think this abridgment is also an improvement.“
What I find fascinating about this project and Lewis’s humble admission? He could imagine that some readers might dislike the longer treatment and prefer a shorter version of the book. For them it could be “an improvement” over the original.1
That got me thinking: What books would you say were too long for your taste, and which too short? What’s a book that just seemed to drag on and on, and what’s one that ended too soon?
Leave your comments below.
To prime the pump, I’ll mention one book from both categories. Too long? Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, which would have been doubly fascinating in half the pages. Too short? I just finished re-reading Shusaku Endo’s The Samurai. Both times through I could imagine the story going on and on. I’m hoping to share my review this weekend, along with a look at Endo’s Silence.
Now it’s your turn. Name one or more books that should have been shorter. And waht about one or more that could have profited from more pages?
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Of course, even the shorter version might not please everyone. When I tweeted the cover and brief background story of The Tortured Planet, Philip Pullman—yes, that Philip Pullman—responded to say, “Rubbish, however short it is.”
Les Misérables. Many have complained about the detours in that book. I didn't mind any of them that much until he began introducing Marius's friends so we would have a sense of them before they died. It was a long list of this guy did this, that guy liked that, another remarked and teased about so-and-so. It was awful.
No book I liked was ever too long.
And few books that dragged too long were memorable enough to criticize here. And if it was bad enough, for any reason, I cast it aside and forgot about it! I feel no obligation to finish a book that has clearly fallen short, for any reason. The author gets the benefit of the doubt, but it is not unlimited.
I suppose The Stand by Stephen King was too long. That was the one that made me give up on him. Time Enough for Love by Robert A. Heinlein was too long, self-indulgent, senile sex fantasies. Even so, it had its good parts.
2666 by Roberto Bolaño was very long, but I would happily have had another 100 pages. Same with War and Peace. Same with Bleak House. Same with The Man Without Qualities. Some long books are like worlds you inhabit, and you are forced to leave them when they end.