"I found it slow ..."/"... too much detail"

I agree with previous posters in that I see some of it as a matter of personality or lifestyle (some people don't have - or think they don't have - time for details).

BUT let me tell you, as a high school literature teacher, that I see a very worrying trend of loss of attention span and capacity to focus: many people struggle to read even longish articles nowadays, so I think it may have something to do with our hyper stimulating culture...

But 372 pages isn't particularly long. I'd feel short changed if a book was much shorter than that.

Maybe if people want 'quick reads' then they should read books that are marketed as such.

Another reason why I generally don't read reviews or take much notice of them as many people want different things to me.

See also overseas hotels where 'the food was crap' when what they meant was 'the meat was on the bone, seafood was in still in its shells and nothing was coated in breadcrumbs'.

Surely it depends on the writing. Some authors weave such a rich tale with detail that I can't get enough of it and the atmosphere conjured up shapes characters, brings the book to life and I fall head first into the location/story/era.

Another author can describe a similar scene and I am flicking pages willing them to stop banging on in tedious detail and get back to the story. This, more than anything else, is likely to make me give up on a book.

I’m a novelist. It certainly isn’t something publishers ‘ask for’. My agent wasn’t able to sell my longest MS (120,000 words), and Faber is publishing individual Clare Keegan short stories (Foster isn’t even really a novella, it’s a slightly expanded New Yorker short story) as separate volumes.

I don’t much like The Luminaries either (though her first novel is great). But it’s not necessarily reflective of anything other than one set of judges’ compromise decision. (I mean, I don’t know anything about that decision, but friends have been judges on other prizes. Sometimes it comes down to five people each arguing vehemently for a different winner, and having to make do with a compromise everyone agrees on being respectfully ‘meh’ about.)

I've just finished the Labyrinth of the Spirits, the last of the Carlos Ruiz Zafon books about Barcelona. It's just over 800 pages and I raced through it it's so gripping all the way through. There are plenty of descriptions - of the characters, of the city - but hardly a wasted word, although I wouldn't have missed the final section much if it had been left out.

People want different things from literature. Some are primarily interested in language. Readers like that would favour Nabokov, Woolf, even P G Wodehouse – real masters of style. Anita Brookner is another good example. She doesn't have much to say, but she's a superb stylist. You read her for the sheer beauty of her language. Others want intellectual stimulation. They read because they love ideas. People like that would prefer Aldous Huxley or Oscar Wilde.

Those who criticise a book for moving too slowly are probably most interested in plot. They want a good story and resent the author for taking too long. Personally, if I were to list the things I look for in a novel, plot would be near the bottom. I don't even read Dickens for the plot. Frankly, his plots are often wretched – full of absurd coincidences and unrealistic happy endings. I've never felt a novel was moving too slowly. I either enjoy it or I don't.

I think that most books have too much ‘padding’ these days. In the last couple of decades the average book length has gone up from 350-450 pages. This isn’t really personal taste, it is what the publishers ask for. I haven’t found the extra 100 pages generally added much.

The ultimate emperors new clothes book is, for me, The Luminaries, 850 pages of pretentious rubbish, but ticked a lot of boxes for the booker judges. But those are weeks of my reading life that I will never get back.

William Boyd, on the other hand, has written some long books but they are well crafted and very readable, as has Kazuo Ishiguro, though my favourite one of his os very short.

Ooh which Lucy Diamond book was it op? I love her books!

Thanks @ImJustMadAboutSaffron it seems like an interesting book 😊

Sometimes I want a deeper read & sometimes I just want a quick fun detective story.
i think it also depends on what kind of brain you have - I dont have an minds eye so long descriptions are just a long list of information to me whereas my Husband & son see what they're reading in their mind like watching a tv.

(Agree both that Strike is long not slow & later Shardlake's are poorer for excess description.)

No.

It’s far, far too much information. You only need a few details, not a whole page or more.

As I said, he managed to set the scene perfectly well in his earlier books with a fraction of the description.

Yes, this.

isn't there a technique where you know if something's had attention paid to it you know it's important to the plot/characters?

Chekhov's gun?

@ImJustMadAboutSaffron it was self published. An issue I'm torn about. Because I think anyone who wants to write a book should have the opportunity to do so, and not every book will get picked up by a publisher.
OTOH an awful lot of crap can be published if you do it yourself.

Edited for a typo

Why do you think that this is in any way judgemental?

You don’t think calling something “disposable” and equating “surface-skimming” with disposable is judgemental? Also, in your follow up comments you make it clear that you think your opinion is the right one.

Why do people want surface skimming stories that are disposable?

Because they hold my interest far more than long, boring descriptions of scenery and extraneous details.

Because people are different.

You sound very judgemental

'Too much detail' to me, means the book reads like they're trying to get the word-count up.

I can't remember what it was (I half think it was the True Blood books), but the author would describe every outfit - pointlessly, didn't add anything to the plot, or the scene, just felt like page-filler.

Slow, I think of things like 3-body problem - I enjoyed it, liked the ideas, but felt that it needed an editor so the author got to the point a bit better!

I don't have that issue with the Strike novels - I quite like the pace/level of detail - isn't there a technique where you know if something's had attention paid to it you know it's important to the plot/characters? I think that's done well in the Strike novels, not to obvious, not too obscure.

Because different people like different things. Because different types of books need different things IMO. Because the mood I'm in directs what genre of book I'll read and what I expect from that book.

I DNFd my first book in about 15 years recently. It was painfully slow. Eg "The man got home. He opened front door. The man hung his coat up and closed the door. He sat in the armchair. It was a big armchair. The armchair was yellow"

Absolutely none of that was relevant.

I loathe long drawn-out descriptions of everything, it makes me think of Dame Sally Markham, just using words for the sake of it. I prefer writing that's straight to the point.

Just curious, what did you read by Lucy Diamond, OP?

I've yet a meet a book that is too 'slow' for me. And in this I include the entire works of Beckett, Gwendoline Riley novels where a young woman just goes to work in a bar and then goes home again repeatedly, and Claire-Louise Bennett's Pond where an entire chapter is devoted to the declining performance of the three control knobs on the narrator's oven.

These things are down to personal taste. I'm generally not drawn to plotty novels.