In Defense of Really Long Books
By: Spencer Ellsworth
Tags: Game of Thrones, Comics, Wheel Of Time, Books

Not too long ago, I bought Alan Moore’s Jerusalem off the shelf at Powell’s. It was on sale… which is to, say, under 30$… and as I smiled at the cashier and hefted all 1200 pages of it, dropped it into my backpack and then realized I couldn’t get the backpack on.

Kidding.

Mostly.

It was a long walk to the train station from the bookstore, I’ll say that.

I can’t explain why I bought a 1200-page, tiny-print novel by a reclusive warlock. Yes, he wrote my favorite graphic novel From Hell. Yes, Watchmen blew my mind. I loved peak Alan Moore, in his peak days. But he’s not in his peak days, and even then he was a little too verbose and…

It was just a massive book.

And I, a little reader.

Begging to get lost.

We all want books to steal attention, cause us to abandon everything else, and plunge us into new and different worlds. The longer the book, the deeper, the darker and more wrenching the emotion, the more powerful the immersion.

It’s a wonderful feeling, to get hooked on page five or ten or fifty and realize that you have nine hundred more pages to sink into this world. That moment, when Mr. Norrell summoned a thistle-down haired man to perform a resurrection, when the Trollocs bashed in Rand al’Thor’s door, when Jaime Lannister tossed Bran Stark off the tower… suddenly the remaining space in the brick became a mountain of excitement. All those pages. All that intrigue, horror and wonder!

The detail just adds to it. The multiplying viewpoints, across Earth, Mars and the Belt, at every level of intrasolar politics, in The Expanse! The intrigues of every level of clan crime in Jade City! The intertwining threads of music, story, school and legend-busting in The Name of the Wind! The encyclopedic footnotes in the aforementioned Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell!

You can’t get that from 300 pages.

Long books have their detractors, of course. Usually those detractors work at the publisher.

You can’t blame them. There’s a lot of new writers who can’t figure out how to cut, so they write a 200,000-word opus… and even if it’s good, even if that writer’s got good instincts, or has worked their way up from short stories and shorter books, well, 1200 pages is a big print job.

That takes shelf space from smaller books, ships fewer units by volume, and sells for a slight markup from something half the size.

Readers also tend to like books that go well on airplanes and bus rides and, uh, guilty. When I’m deep in a monster book I love, I still think twice before it comes on the train, bus, or bike ride to said public transit with me. I’m getting older and they’re still working out the bugs in Back 2.0.

Then there’s the tendency to over-detail. Who hasn’t complained about George RR Martin’s very long accounts of the feasts in Westeros? About the endless rounds of bickering and dress descriptions in Robert Jordan’s middling volumes? And… well, I love From Hell but I have to admit that when I reread it, I don’t reread Moore’s dissertation-worthy endnotes.

Read ’em, er, once.

Still, with the constant fight against rapid media, with flickering screens, tweets, and tiny nuggets of information fighting for my attention, I hunger all the more for a cinder block made of paper and ink that will insist I put down my phone, remote, laptop, call in sick to work and take a deep plunge.

So, Moore, you old warlock, as I make tea and unpack Jerusalem on a cold Sunday morning, ready your magic. Keep the black candles burning and be ready to chant for a while, because I want to get lost.