What Roger Ebert said about films – that no bad film is short enough, and no good film is long enough – probably applies to books as well. Still, the prospect of reading a good book often comes attached with a sense of dread if you have to spend weeks, rather than days, in finishing it.
In the world of fiction, excessive length is not so daunting a challenge, as anyone who has whipped through the Harry Potter or Game of Thrones books will tell you. A well-told story will have anyone hooked regardless of its size. This also goes for literary classics, like War and Peace or In Search of Lost Time.
As for serious non-fiction however, questions often go begging about whether the length of books is justified. Ideas that float around the humanities and social sciences can often be expressed economically, but nonetheless find their most consistent publication in long, dense tomes.
For the most part, this phenomenon can be addressed with two responses. One is that big subjects – the Second World War, the origins of individualism, the future of the world’s religions – often deserve big books. Secondly, even if the central propositions of these subjects can be expressed concisely, evidence to support them cannot. It takes time both to marshal evidence and to justify your interpretation of it, in order to back up your arguments.
But even then, as a reader of many non-fiction works, I’m often left scratching my head as to why some books are so long. Recently I completed Nancy Rosenblum’s On the Side of the Angels, a study of political parties and partisanship. If you exclude endnotes and index, Rosenblum’s book runs to four hundred and fifty nine pages. Normally this wouldn’t be so eye-catching, except on the third-last page Rosenblum admits that she has left a lot out of her analysis and has only ‘skimmed the surface’ of some issues.
This is quite an astonishing claim to come by at the end of a book I spent nine days reading. My first thought was: ‘Wow, if you can’t fully explicate your chosen subject in over four hundred and fifty pages, how much more space do you need? Eight hundred pages? A thousand?’ It’s quite dispiriting to spend so much time with a book, at times very dry and repetitive, only to be told at the end that what you've read is really just a primer for future work.
To be fair to Rosenblum, the concession of incompleteness on the part of the author is a common one for books in the humanities and social sciences. One usually finds at the beginning of books dealing with political, social or historical issues a proviso that what follows will not be exhaustive or complete, but merely suggestive, descriptive or polemical. I read these admissions as pre-empting any charges readers might make that the authors in question have not addressed certain things, or left some questions unanswered or have simply failed to talk about the things the reader wanted them to talk about.
So the admission of incompleteness is as much made for the author’s sake as for the reader’s. It eases the burden of trying to comprehensively cover any given subject. Not that individual writers should be charged with doing so. It’s simply not feasible for scholars and intellectuals, no matter how formidably informed, to cover in total all the facts, theories and interpretations that would demand to be covered.
This being the case, the question remains why, even with the knowledge that no one book can satisfy the demand for comprehensiveness, they have to be as big as they are. In Rosenblum’s case, one can make the claim that her subject – the function of political parties in democracies – justifies its length. But her subtitle is ‘Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship’. The word ‘Appreciation’ signifies a rather relaxed attitude to the subject, that the reader is not to expect an argument as such but something more akin to reflection. My experience reading this book signifies the opposite. It is a scholarly book, with copious references to other works and is in no way ‘light’. In his review of On the Side of the Angels, Paul Starr in The New Republic said that at least a third of the book could be excised at no cost to her central argument. I think that’s about right, and the same goes for a number of other books I’ve read.
Of course there are instances where the length of a scholarly book is matched by both the subject-matter and the intention of its author. I have in mind here Randall Collins’ astonishing tome The Sociology of Philosophies. Again, if you exclude its bibliography, endnotes and appendixes, Collins’ sociological treatment of global philosophical change reaches eight hundred and eighty one pages. This length for me is justified by the fact that Collins’ effort covers an enormous range of material from scrutinizing hundreds of philosophical texts to providing multi-layered historical and sociological explanations for their production and impact. Thirty-five years in the making, one can understand why Collins requires the number of pages he does in putting forward his argument. Plus, a reader shouldn’t look at a title like The Sociology of Philosophies and expect a short essay.
On other occasions however, a short essay is really all that is required to convincingly articulate one’s point of view. This is why literary criticism is best delivered in essay form, why great philosophical tracts are often essay-length (think of Wittgenstein’s works, or Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit), and why popular lectures that are converted into books often don’t bleed out beyond a hundred pages. There are some arguments which are just as convincing when explicated in fifty pages as when they’re explicated in four hundred. George Steiner’s essay on his failed attempt to write a book on the scientist Joseph Needham conveys just as rich a sense of the subject as Simon Winchester’s biography of the man.
The key factor in play here is whether the author’s intentions and subject matter roughly equate to the space used to cover them. If an author is recounting the experience of her first orgasm, then writing a Tolstoy-length confession probably isn’t justified. If, however, an author is putting forward her belief that humans (all humans, everywhere, throughout all history) are naturally altruistic rather than selfish, then any intelligent reader would permit her to take her time in arguing this.
The political philosopher Quentin Skinner once remarked that his advice to his graduate students was to write small books on big subjects. This was because doing so would guarantee them an audience. But Skinner’s two most notable former students – Simon Schama and Roy Porter – became famous even though they wrote improbably large (four hundred pages plus) tomes. Skinner professed astonishment not only at how individuals could churn out books of this size (do they have magic typewriters?) but that people would actually buy and read them. Apparently they do. I certainly have, even if there are times when I’m halfway through a five hundred page book on the decline of political legitimacy in Europe and I start thinking to myself: ‘Whatever happened to Kevin Sorbo?’
I’ll conclude with this question: would all arguments made in the humanities and social sciences be better if they were trimmed or more tightly edited? The sociologist Alan Wolfe remarked in a lecture that all writers should love for their work to be seriously taken apart by a professional editor. (An editor probably would have advised against this extra paragraph). The answer is a qualified yes: qualified because if taken too far constant trimming can reduce the force of an argument. Sometimes, arguments by academics and intellectuals can be so tight that they don’t amount to arguments at all, but merely assertions. And if there is a major problem with debate in general these days it’s that people too often think that having an opinion constitutes having an argument. In this sense, big books – tiresome and time-consuming though they may be – are a necessary corrective in a world of mental short-circuiting and quick fixes.
In the world of fiction, excessive length is not so daunting a challenge, as anyone who has whipped through the Harry Potter or Game of Thrones books will tell you. A well-told story will have anyone hooked regardless of its size. This also goes for literary classics, like War and Peace or In Search of Lost Time.
As for serious non-fiction however, questions often go begging about whether the length of books is justified. Ideas that float around the humanities and social sciences can often be expressed economically, but nonetheless find their most consistent publication in long, dense tomes.
For the most part, this phenomenon can be addressed with two responses. One is that big subjects – the Second World War, the origins of individualism, the future of the world’s religions – often deserve big books. Secondly, even if the central propositions of these subjects can be expressed concisely, evidence to support them cannot. It takes time both to marshal evidence and to justify your interpretation of it, in order to back up your arguments.
But even then, as a reader of many non-fiction works, I’m often left scratching my head as to why some books are so long. Recently I completed Nancy Rosenblum’s On the Side of the Angels, a study of political parties and partisanship. If you exclude endnotes and index, Rosenblum’s book runs to four hundred and fifty nine pages. Normally this wouldn’t be so eye-catching, except on the third-last page Rosenblum admits that she has left a lot out of her analysis and has only ‘skimmed the surface’ of some issues.
This is quite an astonishing claim to come by at the end of a book I spent nine days reading. My first thought was: ‘Wow, if you can’t fully explicate your chosen subject in over four hundred and fifty pages, how much more space do you need? Eight hundred pages? A thousand?’ It’s quite dispiriting to spend so much time with a book, at times very dry and repetitive, only to be told at the end that what you've read is really just a primer for future work.
To be fair to Rosenblum, the concession of incompleteness on the part of the author is a common one for books in the humanities and social sciences. One usually finds at the beginning of books dealing with political, social or historical issues a proviso that what follows will not be exhaustive or complete, but merely suggestive, descriptive or polemical. I read these admissions as pre-empting any charges readers might make that the authors in question have not addressed certain things, or left some questions unanswered or have simply failed to talk about the things the reader wanted them to talk about.
So the admission of incompleteness is as much made for the author’s sake as for the reader’s. It eases the burden of trying to comprehensively cover any given subject. Not that individual writers should be charged with doing so. It’s simply not feasible for scholars and intellectuals, no matter how formidably informed, to cover in total all the facts, theories and interpretations that would demand to be covered.
This being the case, the question remains why, even with the knowledge that no one book can satisfy the demand for comprehensiveness, they have to be as big as they are. In Rosenblum’s case, one can make the claim that her subject – the function of political parties in democracies – justifies its length. But her subtitle is ‘Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship’. The word ‘Appreciation’ signifies a rather relaxed attitude to the subject, that the reader is not to expect an argument as such but something more akin to reflection. My experience reading this book signifies the opposite. It is a scholarly book, with copious references to other works and is in no way ‘light’. In his review of On the Side of the Angels, Paul Starr in The New Republic said that at least a third of the book could be excised at no cost to her central argument. I think that’s about right, and the same goes for a number of other books I’ve read.
Of course there are instances where the length of a scholarly book is matched by both the subject-matter and the intention of its author. I have in mind here Randall Collins’ astonishing tome The Sociology of Philosophies. Again, if you exclude its bibliography, endnotes and appendixes, Collins’ sociological treatment of global philosophical change reaches eight hundred and eighty one pages. This length for me is justified by the fact that Collins’ effort covers an enormous range of material from scrutinizing hundreds of philosophical texts to providing multi-layered historical and sociological explanations for their production and impact. Thirty-five years in the making, one can understand why Collins requires the number of pages he does in putting forward his argument. Plus, a reader shouldn’t look at a title like The Sociology of Philosophies and expect a short essay.
On other occasions however, a short essay is really all that is required to convincingly articulate one’s point of view. This is why literary criticism is best delivered in essay form, why great philosophical tracts are often essay-length (think of Wittgenstein’s works, or Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit), and why popular lectures that are converted into books often don’t bleed out beyond a hundred pages. There are some arguments which are just as convincing when explicated in fifty pages as when they’re explicated in four hundred. George Steiner’s essay on his failed attempt to write a book on the scientist Joseph Needham conveys just as rich a sense of the subject as Simon Winchester’s biography of the man.
The key factor in play here is whether the author’s intentions and subject matter roughly equate to the space used to cover them. If an author is recounting the experience of her first orgasm, then writing a Tolstoy-length confession probably isn’t justified. If, however, an author is putting forward her belief that humans (all humans, everywhere, throughout all history) are naturally altruistic rather than selfish, then any intelligent reader would permit her to take her time in arguing this.
The political philosopher Quentin Skinner once remarked that his advice to his graduate students was to write small books on big subjects. This was because doing so would guarantee them an audience. But Skinner’s two most notable former students – Simon Schama and Roy Porter – became famous even though they wrote improbably large (four hundred pages plus) tomes. Skinner professed astonishment not only at how individuals could churn out books of this size (do they have magic typewriters?) but that people would actually buy and read them. Apparently they do. I certainly have, even if there are times when I’m halfway through a five hundred page book on the decline of political legitimacy in Europe and I start thinking to myself: ‘Whatever happened to Kevin Sorbo?’
I’ll conclude with this question: would all arguments made in the humanities and social sciences be better if they were trimmed or more tightly edited? The sociologist Alan Wolfe remarked in a lecture that all writers should love for their work to be seriously taken apart by a professional editor. (An editor probably would have advised against this extra paragraph). The answer is a qualified yes: qualified because if taken too far constant trimming can reduce the force of an argument. Sometimes, arguments by academics and intellectuals can be so tight that they don’t amount to arguments at all, but merely assertions. And if there is a major problem with debate in general these days it’s that people too often think that having an opinion constitutes having an argument. In this sense, big books – tiresome and time-consuming though they may be – are a necessary corrective in a world of mental short-circuiting and quick fixes.
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