The Year of the Long Book

2024 is turning out to be the Year of the Long Book, for me at least. I generally set myself a goal of 100 books a year, but that arbitrary. Some books are barely 100 pages, while others are over 1,000 pages. The goal of 100 books loomed large in my head for a time, but more and more, I’m less concerned with how many books I read than enjoying the book I do manage to finish, and learning all I can from them

I was thinking about this because this morning, Goodreads reminded me that I was 6 book “behind schedule.” I wondered about that. Why was I behind schedule? It turns out that the books I’ve read so far this year have been longer books.

What is a long book? Regular readers are aware that I have been keeping a list of all of the books I’ve finished reading since 1996. In the decades that I’ve kept my list, I’ve had to deal with fact that some years I read more books than others. This is true even when it seems I spend the same amount of time reading year-to-year. To that end, I’ve developed a measurement that I call “BEq,” or “book equivalent.” Over the 28-years of my list, the average length of a book I’ve read is 410 pages. I set 1.0 BEq equal to 410 pages. If I read s 300 page book, that is 300/410, or 0.73 BEq. If I read a 950 page book that is 950/410 = 2.32 BEq. I consider a “short” book to be 1 standard deviation below the average, or 0.46 BEq. I consider a long book to be 1 standard deviations above the average, or 1.57 BEq.

Here is a chart showing the average BEq by year. Darker bars are years in which the average BEq is greater than 1.0:

So far, this year, the average BEq is 1.26. That is still my defined BEq for a long book of 1.57, but it is the second highest average BEq I’ve had in 28 years. (For the average BEq for a year to be over 1.57, it means I would have need to have read much longer books.)

What are these long book that I’ve been reading this year? At the time of this writing, I’ve finished 11 books. Of those 11 books, about a third are “long” books by my definition:

• My Name Is Barbra by Barbra Streisand (1,040 pages / 2.54 BEq)
• The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes (886 pages / 2.16 BEq)
• Masters of the Air by Donald L. Miller (671 pages / 1.64 BEq)
• Racing for the Bomb by Robert S. Norris (752 pages / 1.83 BEq)

These four books along total 8.17 BEq, or an average of 2.04 BEq: that is, the equivalent of reading 2 books for every one book I read.

In addition, I am currently making my way through 3 long books. (I don’t count books in-progress on my list. I have to finish a book before it goes on the list;) These are:

• Dark Sun by Richard Rhodes (736 pages / 1.80 BEq)
• The Princeton Companion to Mathematics by Timothy Gowers (1,034 pages / 2.52 BEq)
• Rousseau and Revolution by Will Durant and Ariel Durant (1,091 pages / 2.66 BEq)

All of these books are well over my defined length for a long book. Combined, they average 2.33 BEq. And this trend doesn’t look like it is stopping any time soon. The last of these book, Rousseau and Revolution is the penultimate book in Will and Ariel Durant’s Story of Civilization series. Up next on my list is the final book, The Age of Napoleon, which, at 872 pages, is 2.13 BEq. If you factor all these in for 2024, then my average BEq for the year is 1.49 — very close to the 1.57 BEq mark for long books. So far, then, 2024 is the year of the long book.

There is something about long books that I find irresistible. Maybe it is because I choose these books carefully, and more often than night, they are great reads and I never want them to end. The fact that they are long means I can savor them for a longer period of time. And ultimately, savoring one book is more important to me than reading 50 of them.