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.
Don't say it that way (shivers), but yes, it's worth reading. I listened to an audiobook, so that helped a good bit. By contrast, I gave up on reading The Brothers Karamazov, but I want to go back to it. Perhaps, another translation would help, but IDK.
Yes, they’re popular for a reason: many people love them. One thing interesting to me about Lisa Hayden’s interview was that, as a translator, she refuses to tell people which translations of classic works is best. The choice is too personal. https://www.millersbookreview.com/p/many-people-at-once-lisa-c-hayden
I read it, I liked it, but... I thought chunks of the book were fairly meaningless when, for example, there was a 50+ page side story just to set up one little coincidence in the book.
Have not read it. I wonder if Hugo was copying Homer's capsule biographies of people as they step up only to be swiftly killed off by he heroes in the Iliad?
Nov 17, 2023·edited Nov 17, 2023Liked by Joel J Miller
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.
I finished it, and I enjoyed it. But I also felt that it was too long and meandering. It needed to be edited, I could feel it as I read it. I also read it as a teenager, when it came out. 'Salem's Lot is much better, tighter, genuinely scary, with memorable scenes, like the child holding off the vampires with a plastic crucifix from his vampire toy set, because he has faith, but the priest cannot do it with a crucifix because he does not have faith. I can only remember a mood from The Stand, and no details.
As much as King is known for horror, and I did read some of those, my favorite three Stephen King books are "The Stand", "The Eyes of the Dragon", and "On Writing", none of which are really horror at all. :)
King made a comment once on "The Stand" (maybe actually in "On Writing") where he said that when he started the book, he had no idea what side would win, and he was really impressed how the "good guys" pulled it off. The other bit that I found amusing was that he said as he was writing it, he got hopelessly bogged down with all these stories coming together in one place, and he didn't know what to do, and with 800 pages or so already written, it wasn't like he could just give up on the book. Somehow, he got the inspiration to kill off a number of the lead characters all at once, which he did, and he said from that point, the story became manageable again. ;)
Pretty much! :) When I read the book when I was 14, I cried because one of my favorite characters was one of them who got killed off. However, for the book, in the context of the story, it was probably more believable that the incident happened rather than not.
The Goldfinch is too long (take out the trip to Vegas)! Also I enjoyed first couple Cormoran Strike books but they are way too long and need to be edited. Same with Elizabeth George. I am a huge mystery fan and have read her books for decades but the last 4-5 books have been at least 200 pages to long. I think the more successful the author, the less edited they are and it shows....
There’s a lot of truth to that. I once heard a story about Ayn Rand and her editor. By the time Atlas Shrugged came out, she was uneditable. She left the MS with her editor (or maybe publisher), and he told her it was too long; it would need to be edited. “Would you edit the Bible,” she responded.
“I hardly think this is the Bible,” he said.
“I beg to differ,” she said, snatched her manuscript from the desk, and stormed out. And, of course, Atlas Shrugged is 900-something pages with—at one point—a single speech that runs more than a hundred pages.
At over 1300 pages, Norman Mailer's HARLOT'S GHOST is too short. Because the last three words are "to be continued" and Mailer died without writing the sequel. I vent about it here:
I read *Ahab's Wife* this year and felt "This is really well-written" and "When is it ever going to be over" almost simultaneously almost the whole time.
I found Don Quixote far too long, it was getting a bit tedious by the end. I notice someone has already pointed out Les Miserables - I was there for the hundred pages on a fictional order of nuns, but was thoroughly routed by the Battle of Waterloo.
Aside from that, I've never read a P. G. Wodehouse novel I wanted to end, and I've always wished that The Man Who Was Thursday had gone on for a bit longer.
I’ve heard the same thing about Don Quixote. I think I differ on The Man Who Was Thursday; for me it was exactly the right length. I was just puzzled by the end. I need to read it again.
Some years ago, in the middle of reading Marilynne Robinson's Home, the second of the Gilead novels, I made the comment, "Part of me never wants this book to end. And part of me scarcely wants to go on, for fear of collapse." Well, I didn't collapse (that may have been an overstatement but I was being deeply affected by it) and I did finish reading it (I was never not going to) but the moment the final words were read was the kind of moment that seems to expand indefinitely, holding the work inside the soul in some kind of animated suspension.
"The Demon Tide" could almost cut its first 200 pages: a complete plot cul-de-sac. As much as I love YA fantasy world building, I found myself skimming this one.
"The 7 (1/2) Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle" could have gone on for another 100 pages, and I'd be happy. I felt so frustrated at the end that we don't get to see more of that world. (That's not the point of the book, so I understand why we're not given that, but I still want it!)
War & Peace. I know, I know! The philosophy-history blah blah blah is part of the point. But I wish someone would do a smart abridgment that actually told the story and maybe left in 1/3rd of the historical proselytizing. Keep some of it in there so we get the point, but not so that we get bogged down. It took me 20 years to finally read it.
OK, not great literature, but Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has about 200 pages too many in the middle. The characters move from place to place, and nothing advances the plot. I read it when it first came out, and I figured Rowling was so big by then that no editor dared do his or her job and cut the fat.
Too short a novel - Dickens' Mystery of Edwin Drood. I'm cheating, because he died before he could finish it, but what an fantastic start!
Order of the Phoenix did it for me. I gutted it out but lost all interest in reading further. When the next book came out I did the cost-benefit analysis and read something else—several things else, actually.
Yeah, after Rowling got popular they stopped editing her. 5/6/7 are all too long by several hundred pages. Not that it stopped me from devouring them, but they are not as tight and not as fine as Prisoner of Azkaban (which I personally think is perfect) or Goblet of Fire which is longer and more serious but not overdone.
I have been brought to tears at the ending of more than a couple of novels by Fannie Flagg. She has the ability to pull me into a story so much so that I don't want to leave.
I agree, no book i liked was ever too long, in fact one wished for it to never end. So i suppose a book i had great expectations of and was disappointed with and seemed to go on and on with characters that were not endearing. The obvious consequences to me were apparent in the beginning. The book is Anna Karenina and i am expecting many thumbs down on this opinion:) maybe its Tolstoy? Or the story has cruel infidelity and a narcissic male character?( the Russian class system of the time was interesting ) I enjoy Dostoyevsky. S.Rushdie books come a close second, dare i say, being a Brit also, i never liked Jane Austin either, girl gets rich man( That should start a debate:)
I could not get into the main characters. The main women just seem to be after money, they get the big house they sneaked into or looked around in the end.read them years ago so maybe it was an age bias on my part. I also don’tvlike gossip, and they came over as gossipy. I enjoy john Banville books for a slow, reflective, immersive read. Good children’s stories are wonderful, i can re- read Alice through the looking glass many times . Again, not lord of the rings despite i like fantasy and sci-fi genres.
Very unpopular to admit in some circles (probably even these circles), but I find LOTR pretty tedious myself. I didn’t enjoy it anywhere as much as I imagined I would.
Nov 17, 2023·edited Nov 17, 2023Liked by Joel J Miller
Same here. The movie pace was too fast, but the book’s companionship spots and scenery descriptions just seemed to go on forever. I dare not speak this aloud to my grandsons!
I picked it as one of my best reads of 2023, and it is well-deserving of that honor, but Matthew Barrett's The Reformation as Renewal is nearly 900 pages and probably could have been about half of that length. It's a truly great book, but I'm afraid its bulkiness will inhibit the number of readers it deserves.
Too short: Chesterton's Orthodoxy. Anyone who has read or reread it, will Amen my selection.
Did you not feel if you met Mrs Bennett on the street you would instantly recognize her? P&P is easily the most loved of Auten's books, but the others (excluding MP which is way too long) are all very good and Lady Susan is a comic masterpiece.
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.
Yes!
I finally gave up and read am abridged version, which I enjoyed very much!
Yeah, that’s one of those books I haven’t even attempted—in part because it looks so daunting. Is the juice worth the squeeze?
Yes, Les Misérables is worth it! So much beauty.
Don't say it that way (shivers), but yes, it's worth reading. I listened to an audiobook, so that helped a good bit. By contrast, I gave up on reading The Brothers Karamazov, but I want to go back to it. Perhaps, another translation would help, but IDK.
The new Michael Katz translation is supposedly easier to stomach than prior efforts. https://www.millersbookreview.com/p/michael-katz-brothers-karamazov Might be worth giving a go.
For my part, I've read the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation of Broithers Karamazov (also Demons) several times with great interest.
Yes, they’re popular for a reason: many people love them. One thing interesting to me about Lisa Hayden’s interview was that, as a translator, she refuses to tell people which translations of classic works is best. The choice is too personal. https://www.millersbookreview.com/p/many-people-at-once-lisa-c-hayden
A new translation of Brothers Karamazov by Michael Katz is supposed to be fantastic.
Yes! John Stamps reviewed it here a couple weeks ago: https://www.millersbookreview.com/p/michael-katz-brothers-karamazov
That must be where I first saw it. Thanks!
Yes, read!
I read it, I liked it, but... I thought chunks of the book were fairly meaningless when, for example, there was a 50+ page side story just to set up one little coincidence in the book.
Have not read it. I wonder if Hugo was copying Homer's capsule biographies of people as they step up only to be swiftly killed off by he heroes in the Iliad?
I didn't mind the premise, but I couldn't keep up with it. Too much like homework.
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.
“Like worlds you inhabit”: that’s a perfect description and, yes, those are the books you wish could just go on and on.
I loved "The Stand" and devoured it, even in the 1200 page edition. :)
(Then again, I was 14. I started it again a couple years later, but I don't think I finished that attempt.)
I finished it, and I enjoyed it. But I also felt that it was too long and meandering. It needed to be edited, I could feel it as I read it. I also read it as a teenager, when it came out. 'Salem's Lot is much better, tighter, genuinely scary, with memorable scenes, like the child holding off the vampires with a plastic crucifix from his vampire toy set, because he has faith, but the priest cannot do it with a crucifix because he does not have faith. I can only remember a mood from The Stand, and no details.
As much as King is known for horror, and I did read some of those, my favorite three Stephen King books are "The Stand", "The Eyes of the Dragon", and "On Writing", none of which are really horror at all. :)
King made a comment once on "The Stand" (maybe actually in "On Writing") where he said that when he started the book, he had no idea what side would win, and he was really impressed how the "good guys" pulled it off. The other bit that I found amusing was that he said as he was writing it, he got hopelessly bogged down with all these stories coming together in one place, and he didn't know what to do, and with 800 pages or so already written, it wasn't like he could just give up on the book. Somehow, he got the inspiration to kill off a number of the lead characters all at once, which he did, and he said from that point, the story became manageable again. ;)
That’s hilarious. “Now that they’re out of the way…”
Pretty much! :) When I read the book when I was 14, I cried because one of my favorite characters was one of them who got killed off. However, for the book, in the context of the story, it was probably more believable that the incident happened rather than not.
The Goldfinch is too long (take out the trip to Vegas)! Also I enjoyed first couple Cormoran Strike books but they are way too long and need to be edited. Same with Elizabeth George. I am a huge mystery fan and have read her books for decades but the last 4-5 books have been at least 200 pages to long. I think the more successful the author, the less edited they are and it shows....
There’s a lot of truth to that. I once heard a story about Ayn Rand and her editor. By the time Atlas Shrugged came out, she was uneditable. She left the MS with her editor (or maybe publisher), and he told her it was too long; it would need to be edited. “Would you edit the Bible,” she responded.
“I hardly think this is the Bible,” he said.
“I beg to differ,” she said, snatched her manuscript from the desk, and stormed out. And, of course, Atlas Shrugged is 900-something pages with—at one point—a single speech that runs more than a hundred pages.
Agree about the Goldfinch. I have Strike novels on audible and with a good narrator those books are probably more enjoyable than a physical read
Good to know!
At over 1300 pages, Norman Mailer's HARLOT'S GHOST is too short. Because the last three words are "to be continued" and Mailer died without writing the sequel. I vent about it here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/kentpeterson/p/reading-jerks?r=txq7&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Thanks for the link! “And then he died. Like a jerk.” Ha!
I read *Ahab's Wife* this year and felt "This is really well-written" and "When is it ever going to be over" almost simultaneously almost the whole time.
It’s funny how a book can do that: beautiful tedium.
What a great phrase. And perfect for that one.
I found Don Quixote far too long, it was getting a bit tedious by the end. I notice someone has already pointed out Les Miserables - I was there for the hundred pages on a fictional order of nuns, but was thoroughly routed by the Battle of Waterloo.
Aside from that, I've never read a P. G. Wodehouse novel I wanted to end, and I've always wished that The Man Who Was Thursday had gone on for a bit longer.
I’ve heard the same thing about Don Quixote. I think I differ on The Man Who Was Thursday; for me it was exactly the right length. I was just puzzled by the end. I need to read it again.
To be honest I'm not sure I've ever understood the end either, but I love the mad-dream quality of the book.
It is wild. That crazy chase passage is pure zaniness. The whole thing is so surreal.
Some years ago, in the middle of reading Marilynne Robinson's Home, the second of the Gilead novels, I made the comment, "Part of me never wants this book to end. And part of me scarcely wants to go on, for fear of collapse." Well, I didn't collapse (that may have been an overstatement but I was being deeply affected by it) and I did finish reading it (I was never not going to) but the moment the final words were read was the kind of moment that seems to expand indefinitely, holding the work inside the soul in some kind of animated suspension.
That’s a rare and wonderful experience.
Grapes of Wrath should have taken a shortcut on US 66. A third too long, at least.
Too bad he couldn’t just average it out against Of Mice and Men. That one is barely a hundred pages.
"The Demon Tide" could almost cut its first 200 pages: a complete plot cul-de-sac. As much as I love YA fantasy world building, I found myself skimming this one.
"The 7 (1/2) Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle" could have gone on for another 100 pages, and I'd be happy. I felt so frustrated at the end that we don't get to see more of that world. (That's not the point of the book, so I understand why we're not given that, but I still want it!)
Yes, when the world-building is effective, you just want to camp out there a while longer.
War & Peace. I know, I know! The philosophy-history blah blah blah is part of the point. But I wish someone would do a smart abridgment that actually told the story and maybe left in 1/3rd of the historical proselytizing. Keep some of it in there so we get the point, but not so that we get bogged down. It took me 20 years to finally read it.
It’s funny how subjective these judgments; several mentioned how much they enjoyed the length of W&P.
OK, not great literature, but Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has about 200 pages too many in the middle. The characters move from place to place, and nothing advances the plot. I read it when it first came out, and I figured Rowling was so big by then that no editor dared do his or her job and cut the fat.
Too short a novel - Dickens' Mystery of Edwin Drood. I'm cheating, because he died before he could finish it, but what an fantastic start!
Order of the Phoenix did it for me. I gutted it out but lost all interest in reading further. When the next book came out I did the cost-benefit analysis and read something else—several things else, actually.
Yeah, after Rowling got popular they stopped editing her. 5/6/7 are all too long by several hundred pages. Not that it stopped me from devouring them, but they are not as tight and not as fine as Prisoner of Azkaban (which I personally think is perfect) or Goblet of Fire which is longer and more serious but not overdone.
I'll give you 5 and 7, but I think Half-Blood Prince was better in that regard.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the last chapters when Tom Sawyer reappears are an agony.
Ha! That really is the feeling, right? Like: “Oh, Lord, not 50 more pages…” You start flipping ahead to see how much grief is in store.
I have been brought to tears at the ending of more than a couple of novels by Fannie Flagg. She has the ability to pull me into a story so much so that I don't want to leave.
That’s the best feeling.
I agree, no book i liked was ever too long, in fact one wished for it to never end. So i suppose a book i had great expectations of and was disappointed with and seemed to go on and on with characters that were not endearing. The obvious consequences to me were apparent in the beginning. The book is Anna Karenina and i am expecting many thumbs down on this opinion:) maybe its Tolstoy? Or the story has cruel infidelity and a narcissic male character?( the Russian class system of the time was interesting ) I enjoy Dostoyevsky. S.Rushdie books come a close second, dare i say, being a Brit also, i never liked Jane Austin either, girl gets rich man( That should start a debate:)
The only Austen I’ve read is Pride and Prejudice, and I did enjoy that quite a bit—though it did get tedious in places.
Reportedly Mark Twain said of P&P:
"Every time I read Pride and Prejudice, I want to dig Jane Austen up from her grave and hit her over the head with her own shinbone!"
But then again, "Every time I read..."
I could not get into the main characters. The main women just seem to be after money, they get the big house they sneaked into or looked around in the end.read them years ago so maybe it was an age bias on my part. I also don’tvlike gossip, and they came over as gossipy. I enjoy john Banville books for a slow, reflective, immersive read. Good children’s stories are wonderful, i can re- read Alice through the looking glass many times . Again, not lord of the rings despite i like fantasy and sci-fi genres.
Very unpopular to admit in some circles (probably even these circles), but I find LOTR pretty tedious myself. I didn’t enjoy it anywhere as much as I imagined I would.
Same here. The movie pace was too fast, but the book’s companionship spots and scenery descriptions just seemed to go on forever. I dare not speak this aloud to my grandsons!
LOL! Tolkien loved a lengthy description! You can tell he’s just sitting there, basking and luxuriating in the prose.
I picked it as one of my best reads of 2023, and it is well-deserving of that honor, but Matthew Barrett's The Reformation as Renewal is nearly 900 pages and probably could have been about half of that length. It's a truly great book, but I'm afraid its bulkiness will inhibit the number of readers it deserves.
Too short: Chesterton's Orthodoxy. Anyone who has read or reread it, will Amen my selection.
Yeah, that’s frustrating. You know you’ve got something good but you also know it’s too imposing for some who might benefit from it.
Did you not feel if you met Mrs Bennett on the street you would instantly recognize her? P&P is easily the most loved of Auten's books, but the others (excluding MP which is way too long) are all very good and Lady Susan is a comic masterpiece.
I wasn’t expecting the comedy—Austen was far more satirical and snarky than I imagined.