Posted on January 18, 2019 at 12:00 PM by Sadye Scott-Hainchek
The Sir Mix-a-Lot parodiers were right: We do like big books and we cannot lie.
The Economist analyzed Goodreads reviews of books tagged as classic literature and discovered a correlation between better reviews and higher page counts.
Of course, there are a variety of theories as to why this is.
One cynical hypothesis is that readers who manage to finish a long book feel compelled to praise it to justify the time they spent; another more cheerful one is that anthologies — often judged as the sum of the whole, not individual parts — are inflating the results.
Check out a graph comparing book length to average rating (and the intensity of said rating) on 1843 Magazine’s website.
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