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Post by Deleted on Jul 28, 2018 23:32:58 GMT
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mrdanwest
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Post by mrdanwest on Jul 29, 2018 0:11:23 GMT
Tolstoy, maybe.
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Bargle
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Post by Bargle on Jul 29, 2018 14:11:09 GMT
James Fenimore Cooper. Never uses one word where seven will do.
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Post by amyghost on Jul 29, 2018 14:42:12 GMT
I'll take any one of those allegedly long-winded writers over the more concise and subliterate dreck on the bestseller lists these days.
Proust, Tolstoi, and yes, even Cooper used written language as the supreme means of communicating thought and ideas--thought and ideas that can't always be boiled down to a single word or catchy phrase. And they wrote for an audience who could digest those thoughts and ideas, and the language that expressed them; much of the modern reading public simply can't or won't. Maybe some of the authors of today would on occasion be better off to choose seven well-selected words in place of the ones they've opted to use.
Yes, I'm a literary snob and proud of it; and threads like these have a way of setting my teeth on edge.
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Post by Deleted on Jul 29, 2018 15:44:04 GMT
I'll take any one of those allegedly long-winded writers over the more concise and subliterate dreck on the bestseller lists these days. Proust, Tolstoi, and yes, even Cooper used written language as the supreme means of communicating thought and ideas--thought and ideas that can't always be boiled down to a single word or catchy phrase. And they wrote for an audience who could digest those thoughts and ideas, and the language that expressed them; much of the modern reading public simply can't or won't. Maybe some of the authors of today would on occasion be better off to choose seven well-selected words in place of the ones they've opted to use. Yes, I'm a literary snob and proud of it; and threads like these have a way of setting my teeth on edge. Concise can be good when it's done right, like John D MacDonald or Cormac McCarthy.
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Post by koskiewicz on Jul 29, 2018 16:00:32 GMT
For me, the collected poems and prose of Wallace Stevens just seems far too verbose.
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Post by amyghost on Jul 30, 2018 2:23:30 GMT
I'll take any one of those allegedly long-winded writers over the more concise and subliterate dreck on the bestseller lists these days. Proust, Tolstoi, and yes, even Cooper used written language as the supreme means of communicating thought and ideas--thought and ideas that can't always be boiled down to a single word or catchy phrase. And they wrote for an audience who could digest those thoughts and ideas, and the language that expressed them; much of the modern reading public simply can't or won't. Maybe some of the authors of today would on occasion be better off to choose seven well-selected words in place of the ones they've opted to use. Yes, I'm a literary snob and proud of it; and threads like these have a way of setting my teeth on edge. Concise can be good when it's done right, like John D MacDonald or Cormac McCarthy. Or Ernest Hemingway. But unfortunately, most concision nowadays is not much more than a demonstration that the author doesn't have very much to say in the first place.
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Post by darknessfish on Jul 30, 2018 9:20:55 GMT
Pynchon? He certainly can make a sentence go on, and on, and on. David Foster Wallace wasn't exactly skilled in the art of brevity, either.
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Post by deembastille on Jul 30, 2018 12:57:52 GMT
Jk Rowling.
No one needs to use two pages to describe a doorknob.
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hanswilm
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Post by hanswilm on Jul 30, 2018 14:20:21 GMT
For me personally it is Stephen King (just at times.....not in every novel but some of them he goes on and on too far with detail and unrelated side tangents) and Herman Melville. It was literally work for me to make it all the way through Moby Dick.
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Post by OldSamVimes on Aug 2, 2018 11:22:53 GMT
Ayn Rand. That Galt speech was far, far too long. He kept saying the same basic thing over and over for something like fifteen pages. Oh look, here it is.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 4, 2018 16:04:23 GMT
Diana Gabaldon and George RR Martin. Both of their editors failed them.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 5, 2018 4:07:10 GMT
For me personally it is Stephen King (just at times.....not in every novel but some of them he goes on and on too far with detail and unrelated side tangents) and Herman Melville. It was literally work for me to make it all the way through Moby Dick. I thought immediately of King. I can tell early King from King post-1986 from reading the first chapter, or so I think.
His early works moved fast, were compelling, even including IT. But then he seemed to turn to a very different path and became incapable of editing out anything he had written.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 5, 2018 4:07:58 GMT
Ayn Rand. That Galt speech was far, far too long. He kept saying the same basic thing over and over for something like fifteen pages. Oh look, here it is. Very true. She should have cut that speech by around 90%. It took me a solid week to slog through the Galt speech.
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mmexis
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Post by mmexis on Aug 5, 2018 16:36:03 GMT
Thomas Hardy gets wordy in his architectural descriptions. You can take the novelist out of architecture, but you can't take the architect out of the novelist.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 5, 2018 18:20:29 GMT
I started to read Swann's Way recently. The English translation was so eloquent and so captivating that I eventually put the book down and decided to brush up on my French before I pursue it any further. I would love to read my favorite novel, War and Peace in its original form as well but what other practical use is there for learning Russian? To answer your question, I think James Michener is the most long-winded writer, and also my personal favorite, of the twentieth century. Of the previous century, probably Poe. I have read nearly all of his works as well.
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Post by pippinmaniac on Aug 6, 2018 4:14:33 GMT
Easy. Charles Dickens.
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Post by novastar6 on Aug 6, 2018 6:00:44 GMT
Stephen King
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Post by louise on Aug 6, 2018 15:38:56 GMT
Dickens can be pretty long winded. ANd Tolstoy. But one has to remember they were writing for an audience with fewer distractions than we have now.
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hanswilm
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old imdb name was Hans-Wilhelm but this site tweaked it to hanswilm
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Post by hanswilm on Aug 14, 2018 19:00:41 GMT
BTW, I just started the Stephen King novel "The Stand". It is about 1450 pages. I know that some of King's book can be so long because he is following a lot of different characters and has several events going on at once but I'm going to bet there's at least a little bit of long-winded writing going on in their.
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