DISCUSSION | Are Big Books Better?

Hello everyone and welcome back to my blog! I'm Genni, and today I'll be doing a discussion post. If you haven't seen my 2019 Challenge post, you might not be aware that I am participating in the discussion challenge hosted by Feed Your Fiction and It Starts at Midnight. For my first discussion post of the year, I wanted to try to get to the bottom of a  bookish question I've had for years: are big books better?

Of course, what is deemed "short" and "big" is objective. If you read only high fantasy, you might think a short book is 400 pages. However, that's pretty long if we're talking about a YA romance. For the purpose of this discussion post, I'm going to be sectioning off the books I read in 2018  into three different categories: small, medium, and large. Small books will be 250 pages and less, medium books between 250 and 399, and large books 400 and over.

In 2018, I read 111 books. Out of these 111, I did not rate 8, leaving 103 ratings for me to look at. Based on my scale above, I have read 22 small, 52 medium, and 29 large books in 2018. This isn't a huge surprise for me. I would say that most books fall in that 300 to 400 range. Since I had a pretty big shift in my reading in 2018, in which I started to read more YA contemporary and adult romance novels, these results make a lot of sense.

In answering this question, I only had one preconceived notion, that the average for small books would have the smallest average. As seen above, I don't read as many short books. I think it's hard to achieve a five star read for a short book, because the book needs to be concise and still powerful in a short time. While my averages do support this prediction, the results don't necessarily support the idea that short books are drastically worse than medium books.

Here are my rating average for each section: short, medium, and large.

• Short Books: 3.534 
• Medium Books: 3.5961
• Long Books: 3.905

As you can see, the average between short and medium books are almost the same. They differ by a mere .0621 stars. These results make me believe that whether a book is 175 pages long or 375 pages, there won't be a huge difference in how much I enjoy the book. However, this is not the case for longer books. My average for long books is almost 4 stars, and almost a full half star higher than my average for short books. 

These results show that I tend to enjoy larger books a bit more, but not by a wide margin. I think this difference is because most of my longer books are from series, like Obsidio by Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner or Lord of Shadows by Cassandra Clare. Some books by my favorite authors were also fell in the long books category, like Autoboyography by Christina Lauren and Starry Eyes by Jenn Bennett. Either way, these results show that I tend to enjoy longer books more than short or medium books. Since there is rarely a difference between short and medium books, it might not be the length that makes books better, but the fact that I am loyal to series and authors and therefore more likely to read and enjoy these longer books more.

At the end of the day, this is all speculative. I would rather not do any sort of statistics to see if my results are significant at a .05 level etc., etc, so these results might no actually mean anything! Even if they do, I'm not going to change my reading habits or make any changes based off these conclusions. I let my mood dictate my reading, and hopefully I'll enjoy the book - whether a new or favorite author, short or long.

Do you prefer shorter or longer books, and what do you read more? I hoped you liked this discussion post! Be on the lookout for my next one, which will be coming in two weeks. I'll be talking about guilt over negative reviews.

Thanks so much for stopping by and I'll see you soon with another post!

Happy Reading!

Genni @ Ready, Set, Read!