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

[ImJustMadAboutSaffron]

I see these comments often in reviews. I just finished a light read by Lucy Diamond and it was described as "slow". It wasn't. It was 372 pages which I think is average. I'm one of those who likes a story to develop properly and I like a lot of detail. I see the Cormoran Strike books get criticised a lot for this - I know they are very very long - but it's necessary to the plot I feel. I like to know about characters, back stories, details - if it's done well.

Why do people want surface skimming stories that are disposable?

I still have Tombland to read - it seems the longest of them all!

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

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.

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'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.

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.)

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.

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'.

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...