"There was a time when novels didn't have to be as long as Gone With the Wind.  (I remember talking to a publisher in the late Eighties who told me his company would not handle any manuscript that wouldn't yield a novel running at least 600-800 pages in length.  I just shook my head and smiled, thinking of all the great books--some of them classics--that ran half that length, maybe less.)"

That was the thing in our house when I was a kid. Once household chores were done in the morning, we used to pile in the car and go to the 2nd hand bookstore.  That's where we picked up a lot of what I like to call SATURDAY AFTERNOON READS... You knew you could finish them on a Saturday afternoon, it wouldn't interfere with your homework time or anything like that, and on monday you could take it to school to trade with your fellow monster-fanatics (or action-adventure, mystery, scifi fantics) 

And to be honest, too many of those 600 -800 page monsters don't pack half the story into them like the old pulps or paperbacks. 

Bill