There's a, perhaps envious, belief that someone like King who's so prolific — like two or three books a year, and most are doorstops — can't be properly good I think. But Dickens managed it, so did Zola, Jack London and others. Mind you back then fiction writing in general was pretty down market in comparison to poetry, so standards were more modest.

@oldjack. Thanks for the Heinlein tip, I'll check it out

I'd reading Hitman by Bret Hart. My word, he doesn't hold back and I've not even got to the Montreal Screwjob yet.

So, Vanished Kingdoms was a bit of a bust. Some jewels here and there, but over 730 pages it starts to wear.

Have now started Neal Stephenson's latest, Reamde. In usual Stephenson fashion, it weighs in at a ludicrous 1040 pages, but I can report that at page 250, it's fantastic. Better than Cryptonomicon.

Had a little history phase running since December, first this:

The Spartans: An Epic History

which I recommend if you like that sort of thing, which I do. He keeps it ticking along and manages the magic balance between over-egging the pudding, and over-simplification.

And now just finishing this:

The English Civil War at First Hand

as it's an area of history I am woefully light on - I'm an ancient man fnaar fnaar). It's basically a collection of contemporary quotations, writings and eye-witness stories which is gripping. An utterly horrific time; I had no idea how many were killed. My only issue, and to call it a criticism would be churlish, is that the 17th Century English can be hard work.

As mentioned on another thread, I've nearly finished Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. The issues in the book were discussed on here recently on some thread called "Why did only Eurasians colonise" or something like that.

It's a fascinating thesis, and an important one. It's very persuasive too. And it's full of interesting facts both about movements of peoples and cultural developments in the pre-historic period.

It does have one glaring deficiency, though, which is that it is mind-numbingly repetitive. A small number of main points are recapped, rehashed and respun so many times that it really tries one's patience. It could have been much better written in 100 fewer pages.

This is true of most big "concept" books these days.

And Collapse is worse.

I assume this is because the publishers no longer stump up for anyone to show the author that less is quite often more?

There seems to be a perverse bias—when most people make less time than ever to read—toward "big books" in the publishing industry. They look more important, I suppose.

An awful lot of books seem to start off as 10-15,000 word essays in the NYT weekend edition. Getting in there sets off a bidding war - $250,000 advances for books based on those articles are not unheard of. But basically all they are doing is taking the eight points they made in the article, turning each one into a chapter with more background/data/anecdotes, then slipping in an intro and conclusion.

Evariste Euler Gauss wrote:
As mentioned on another thread, I've nearly finished Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. The issues in the book were discussed on here recently on some thread called "Why did only Eurasians colonise" or something like that.

It's a fascinating thesis, and an important one. It's very persuasive too. And it's full of interesting facts both about movements of peoples and cultural developments in the pre-historic period.

It does have one glaring deficiency, though, which is that it is mind-numbingly repetitive. A small number of main points are recapped, rehashed and respun so many times that it really tries one's patience. It could have been much better written in 100 fewer pages.

This does seem irritatingly common. Naomi Klein's No Logo was the same. And Arrival City is displaying the same signs 91 pages in (although I'd be happy to be proved wrong).

Garamczy Antal wrote:
An awful lot of books seem to start off as 10-15,000 word essays in the NYT weekend edition. Getting in there sets off a bidding war - $250,000 advances for books based on those articles are not unheard of. But basically all they are doing is taking the eight points they made in the article, turning each one into a chapter with more background/data/anecdotes, then slipping in an intro and conclusion.

And very often 10-15,000 words is the right size for a good magazine article. I'd like to see magazines feature longer stories while books (with few exceptions) should usually be shorter. And of course that's the opposite of the current trends. (At least it seems that way to me. I have no stats to back it up.)

There's a bit of that with Arrival City, yeah, but the diversity of Saunders' examples were enough to keep me going. It's also not especially long.

That's certainly the trend in the UK, Renart, and I agree wholeheartedly. Bring back long reports and short fiction, I'd pay for both.

I want novels to be between 100 and 200 pages long too (or 1,000 and they took ten years to write). But people accept a bucket of Starbucks slop cause they've never tasted a good espresso.

Isn't Amazon selling long article/short book-length pieces for the Kindle? I thought I remembered hearing something about that, but I've forgotten what they were calling them.

I prefer to read printed matter (with pretty pictures and graphics for the magazine articles), but it might be a good thing if that were to take off.

Aye, me too. Mind you, I wonder if the whole digital publishing game isn't done for before it's begun: we're all used to getting everything for free, I can get the greatest books of the olden days for 1p each (+£2.80 P&P) on Amazon, and I'm not tempted to buy a Kindle because I've got a phone for free PDFs. And when I see that search engine full of free things it's not likely I'll be any more tempted to start paying for things either. I find myself in the pecular position of being a penniless potential patron of the arts.

Finished Reamde. I take back what I said about it being better than Cryptonomicon. The main villain is indifferently-written, there are a couple of continuity flaws in the latter half of the book, and the final blow-out goes on for at least eighty pages too many. Good, but could have been better.

Been plowing through Thant Myint-U's Where India Meets China, which is a very interesting book about Burma, and Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. The latter is brilliant, but if you're not already especially interested in the topic of how people make decisions, my guess is this book will be a bit of a chorse.

An anthology of O Henry short stories. His mastery of the language is ... er ... masterful. Some of the twists in the tale are very contrived, but it's the getting there that's the pleasure.

I'm working my way through Michael Connelly's books at the moment. I'm on The Poet, I'd been working my way through the Bosch books, but McEvoy came up in one of them so I decided to read this one.

Really good stuff.

Just finished The Tin Drum. I like bawdy jokes and tall tales, but 560 pages of orifice-poking whimsy rather tries the patience. Benny Hill came to mind, to a soundtrack of Herp Alpert & the Tijuana Brass. I'm not fond of galumphing picaresque novels (Catch-22, Midnight's Children). They buttonhole the reader with a twitchy, houndstooth-jacketed geezer whose manic quips are meant to underline that, behind the grin, behind the indefatigable displays of logorrhea and alliterative giddiness, lies PATHOS. For a while it seemed as if the book would go on for ever, by the kind of miracle of self-renewal Grass repeats to diminishing effect; to wit: Oskar supervises construction of the Berlin Wall; thus emboldened, he joins the Stasi and infiltrates the Red Army Faction as an agent provocateur; then, as populariser of its distinctive motorik beat, Oskar foments Krautrock, and later still, becomes Chancellor of reunified Germany, defeating Gerhard Schröder in a bitter struggle for leadership. Contrary to the above, parts were enjoyable. Even so, it would have been overlong at half the length*.

*Here you may supply your Tin Drum-related innuendo of choice, e.g. "And I don't, please note, mean Oskar's drumstick. Ta-dum!"