51–60 of 118 posts
Books didn't used to be all that long.
Agatha Christie novels were 40 - 60K words.
The Great Gatsby was around 50K IIRC.
Arthur Conan Doyle: The Hound of the Baskerville was 60K
Jaws was about 80K
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one said longer books are better? Good writing is often concise. And the article doesn’t at all conclude “society is in decline”. You seem to be the only one making these leaps and drawing these conclusions.
"Good writing is often concise" is flawed logic when relating to long books, except for myopic planners.
I'm so weary of this sort of 'society is in decline' clickbait articles. Let's take some minimal amount of data, analyze it by some absurd criteria, and then present as some stunning insight. There's so much wrong with this article that its hard to know where to start. The fuzziness of 'page count'. The absence of any consideration of digital readers and whether they even know the page count when starting a book. Who…
I don’t think society is in decline but my best friend is a university teacher and if you allow me an anecdote it’s become obvious to him in the past five years that first year students are less and less familiar with the written world and increasingly good with images and videos as a medium of communication. The shift seems real. Long works of literature were always fairly niche. If you read the articles you will se…
Do you mean they are less familiar with certain books (like famous ones like Ulysses) or their ability to learn from written medium has reduced (concentration levels, speed of reading, etc.)?
> We analyzed 3,444 titles that were ranked top3 on NYT weekly bestseller lists from 2011 to 2021 A little less than never.
I'm not sure why page count instead of word or character count is used - feels like there could easily be external factors such as page size or typeface that are effecting this.
I'm not saying that the content is bad, or you shouldn't buy the book. The book is just padded out so you feel better about buying it. Who would buy a 40-page book for $15? The book gets padded out to 200 pages by repeating itself, adding filler sections, anecdotes, graphic design choices, etc.
I am happy to see books get shorter if it means that they have less filler.
Many things are competing for people's attention combined with people's ability to stay focused[1] going down may contribute to this. This is probably to be expected as we take the discipline out of people. [1] Universities discussing whether classes should be delivered in 10 minute chunks because students can no longer stay focused for 50 mins to an hour any more.
I know a lot of teachers and have heard some pretty dire reports about trends in reading skills in students. Even the "advanced" kids are tripped up by sentences as complex as the sort that were common in juvenile literature of the postwar 20th century. This wasn't the case 15 years ago, but books that would have been unremarkable assignments back then are now very difficult for kids in the same grades. This isn't a…
The data are interesting, but the conclusion of "because Internet" is neither supported or overturned by the data -- they don't explain that at all
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are a select few agents who specialize in literary fiction. If you start a naive search of literary agents, you will find that their stated interests zero in on books that are of the political moment. The majority of agents are looking for a book, preferably young adult fiction, that focuses on a protected class, of which the author should also be a member. This is not a complaint, but the evident regression to…
A look at the Pulitzer Prize for fiction suggests to me that production has been uneven for a long time