In this technology age, why are books becoming so thick, and movies so long?
Were we not promised that technology would bring us more time for everything?
I have reached the stage - and the age, probably - where my judgment of whether to read a book or watch a movie is influenced greatly by its length. As an avid follower of crime novels, including US organised crime, I stopped short when Don DeLillo unleashed Underworld on an unsuspecting public.
Eight hundred odd pages of plot and sub-plot, including what the author himself described later as "a little over-indulgence". My brain screamed "STOP!" and my cultural intake has changed ever since.
If I calculate the number of hours it might take to drag weary eyes across the pages of some dreary long novel, I conclude quickly that the answer is "too many".
I cannot offer a view on J.K. Rowling's talents as, to be honest, I have taken not the slightest interest in her work. One simple weighing-up - literally - of an early Harry Potter was enough to push me away.
Chandler told great stories in 200 pages or fewer? Even my childhood favourite, Steinbeck's epic Grapes of Wrath, stretched only to 500. Movies have gone the same way. When I receive a movie recommendation, I stop to make one vital check - its duration. Anything more than 180 minutes is dismissed unseen. Above 120 will be scrutinised carefully before cinema tickets are bought.
Now some of this may well be middle age and a slipping attention span. But let's be honest: are bigger, fatter books actually better? If all the great movies used to close at one hour 30 minutes, are these modern blockbusters supreme improvements on what came before? Sadly, no.
The blame lies, of course, with technology itself. Would a modern author really churn out hundreds and hundreds of pages if he actually had to type them on pieces of paper, then edit them laboriously? No, his word processor serves no physical self-editing purpose and blindly indulges verbosity.
Some of the greatest music of the modern age was made on vinyl LPs, and usually around 42 minutes long only, because that's how long 12-inch vinyl discs could properly reproduce sound.
It is time to protest at this modern curse. We want booklets, not doorstops; features not blockbusters. I know I am not alone, as I heard the novelist Ian Rankin make a similar complaint on the radio.
I would write more, but I was asked me to stop at 420 words.
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