WORDS

[uraniun235]

Recently I heard that the long-awaited final book to The Wheel of Time - delayed by the author's death - was being split into three books by the new author. I was intrigued by this as I had caught wind of Robert Jordan's promise to his fans to keep the finale to one volume, even if it meant running to 2000 pages or more hardcover, so I've recently

Comments

[dusktejina]

Good lord, when I waded through Atlas Shrugged I actually had to skip half of that fifty-page speech. It was self-indulgent to the point of vulgarity, and she began repeating herself after the tenth paragraph or so. And like all utopian pipe-dreams, hers started to fall apart as soon as she introduced the existence of that secret village in the mountains, and the identity of John Galt. Up until then, she had the elbow-room of ambiguity to work with. It would've honestly been a better book if she just let Dagny die in a plane crash chasing her pipe-dream, and the whole thing turned out to be a tragedy.

But I digress. We were talking about word-counts, not literary taste.

[dusktejina]

As for an 800k+ book, they'd never be able to produce a paperback edition. The binding would simply fall apart from the stress.

[uraniun235]

Thought you might be interested to know: I looked up Fallen Dragon, and it's 248,530 words.

Also apparently Hamilton wrote a book called The Naked God which weighs in at about 469,000 words; Wikipedia claims that it was only possible to print it as a one-volume paperback by using a smaller fontsize.

So, yeah, at 800K there's no way it could have been a one-volume paperback. Robert Jordan boasted that he'd bully the publisher into inventing a new means of binding (or of requiring delivery via library cart, or "something"), but I think it would have fallen flat in the face of revolt from the bookstores.