Impressions of books read years ago

[Pyan]

I was in Borders the other day, and idly picked up and flipped through a copy of The Moon of Gomrath, by Alan Garner.
Now, I can remember reading this years ago - about 196(koff) - and my impression was that it was about the size of a modern fantasy novel - when in fact, it's less than 200 fairly large-print pages. I suppose that the years since I read it have added size and weight to the memories.

Anyone else run into this phenomenon?

 

[Culhwch]

Certainly I have reread books that I remember loving when I first read them, and been roundly dissappointed. But I guess that's a part of growing as a reader...

 

[gully_foyle]

I know what you mean. Alot of the SF books I read in the late 70's were pretty slim volumes compared to the wheel chocks that get published these days. And its interesting to reread them and find them pretty simplistic too. I guess many of them were actually serials from Analog and the like.

 

[Anthony G Williams]

Personally, I often prefer the pacing of a c.200 page novel (which was the standard length for a novel in the 1950s/60s - they seem to have been getting steadily longer ever since). I don't think that's just down to nostalgia for the type of stories I grew up with, I think there is an issue about appropriate lengths for different purposes.

If you're writing an epic, especially one stretching over a significant period of time, then you have to go long - LOTR needs to be the length it is. But for a conventional SF/thriller, length is not necessarily an advantage. I find with many long novels that I lose interest - either because the pacing and ideas are slowed down to fill the space, or because so much detail is packed in, and it takes so long to read, that I lose track of who is doing what to whom.

I haven't yet clarified my thinking on this as it's just occurred to me, but I suspect that the c.200-page novel may be roughly equivalent to the standard 2 hour (more or less) feature film: it fits more comfortably within the human attention span.

 

[Connavar]

Me too i love 200 page SF books. Thanks to people like PKD,Heinlein etc

If its not some space epic it shouldnt be more than 200-300 for me.


Its not nostalgia for me im not old enough for it to be that and i have been reading SF since 2000.




I see what you mean though Pyan, i fear reading books i adored as a young boy cause i have grown alot specially as reader since then ,taste and maturity wise too.

 

[The Ace]

Yeah, I got hold of the entire, "Dark is Rising," sequence, which I hadn't read since the early '80's (My 'Late,' brother gave them to a jumble sale ). I was surprised at how short they were, but not the quality of the writing.

 

[j d worthington]

As far as the length aspect goes... Well, I've not run into that problem (perhaps because I still read a lot of that stuff now and again). Besides, I think that, because the books were so much shorter, they packed a lot more into many of them... they're more densely written, more tightly-knit, with very, very little fat or wasted verbiage. Nowadays people are prone to make the mistake that size equals quality, which is by no means always the case. (Nor is the reverse always true; as noted above, it depends on the book.)

As far as quality... I've got to admit that I've only had a handful of things disappoint me after time... perhaps because I was aware of their faults (if they were something I'd read since my mid- to late-teens) and made allowances, or perhaps because I can enjoy them on varying levels at different ages... and sometimes it's a combination, or even something else. But I've been fortunate in not finding myself all that disappointed, and even then the disappointment has been a rare thing....