Are books getting bigger even as attention spans continue to shrink and sentence lengths shrivel? Well, maybe. Boris Kachka, for one, thinks “it’s tempting to proclaim this the era of the Very Long Novel (VLN).” In his essay he looks at some of the reasons this may be happening, including new buzz words like “counterprogramming,” “binge reading,” and “world-building.” Unmentioned in the essay is the fact that the Very Long Novel on an e-reader doesn’t weigh any more than a Very Short Novel, which might also help.
