"Another damned, thick square book"

The Guardian had a piece on the trend of modern books getting longer (and as the author argues, way too long). The article cited the recent works of Jonathan Franzen, Tony Blair, and Ken Follett as examples. I hadn't really thought of it before, but (modern, bestseller) books do in fact seem to be getting longer. Two of the last three books I read were 600+ pages.

Sometimes I like how books are becoming longer (more story to tell, more time with the characters. Or if the book is non-fiction, more details and context); other times I think that story could have been told in half the amount of pages. Another downside of long books is that it takes me that much longer to finish one book; and as someone that constantly has a stack of books I want to read, I feel I'm neglecting other books. It's much harder to put a dent in the "To Read" list when I keep reading 600+ paged books.

The author of the piece asks:

Whatever happened to brevity? Once upon a time, it was not just the soul of wit, there was a strong literary preference for the shorter book, from Utopia to Heart of Darkness. More recently, The Great Gatsby, for my money the greatest novel in English in the 20th century, comes in at under 60,000 words, a miracle of compression. The novels of that great triumvirate -- Waugh, Greene and Orwell -- average 60-70,000 words apiece; even 1984 is not much over 100,000 words.  

That neglected genius, Robert Louis Stevenson, used to say: "The only art is to omit." In a letter to a friend, he declared -- in words that should be nailed over every writer's desk -- "If there is anywhere a thing said in two sentences that could have been as clearly and engagingly said in one, then it's amateur work."