How long should a book be? Epic novels of 800 or more pages can be very daunting to some people. They fear they’ll never finish them. I like a good epic novel; I get all wrapped up in the characters and I want to find out what happens to them. But they do take a long time to read and if it’s a book that tends to drag on and on, I begin to feel as though it is keeping me from getting to other books in my large unread pile. Short stories are my least favorite, I always want to know more and am rarely satisfied with a short story. My ideal length is somewhere between 200 and 400 pages. I can usually finish a book of that length in a week or less and move on to the next one. Aside from my large stack of unread printed books, I have dozens of ebooks sitting on my Kindle. They’re all there, patiently waiting for me to get to them. So what’s your ideal book length?