I was going to make this post longer but I hear they're running out of space on the Internet

There's a fun discussion about long novels going on (or that has already gone on) at The Elegant Variation. Additional reading material can be found at Return of the Reluctant and Conversational Reading and probably other places I haven't found or don't recall right now. This is all sparked by the Canadian-published Hunger's Bridges, which is soon to be imported to America and which clocks in at a spritely 1360 pages. More on this little dish can be found here.

My take on the issue--if you can call it an issue, and if anybody cares for my take--is that novels, good novels, are exactly as long as they need to be. Long novels can read fast and short novels can be turgid. Long novels can be turgid and short novels can read fast. Both short and long novels can transcend to air the limitations of their pages while bashing you in the head with the weight of the language itself; both can wholly suck you into a world for an extended period of time, both can leave you wishing there could be more. Length, when proper and correct, is relatively insignificant. And before this paragraph becomes inappropriate, let's call up a paragraph break.

All that said: there is an occasional implication by the occasional person that sometimes words count more in other modes of writing; that because column space is limited so every word in an article counts, or that because of rhythm and cadence every word in a poem counts, that these somehow imply that, because the length of a novel is decided only by the whims of the author, the editor, and the marketing team, there are words in novels that do not count. Suffice it for me to say, merely, humbly, that I disagree. And I shall leave it at that, lest I begin to froth at the mouth while spitting juvenile insults.

All of that said, you should probably take two hours to read Paul La Farge's translation of Paul Poissel's The Facts of Winter, a slender volume of text that I think I've already spent more time thinking about than I did actually reading. At 150 pages, it's light as air and completely adventurous; reading it is to take a hard gust of wind to the cloudiest edges of your mind. In color. In black and white.