novel/novella
i track all kinds of things about the books i read, and one of them is whether they are novels, novellas, or short story collections (or nonfiction or poetry). however, distinguishing between novels and novellas is not always easy.
the novel/novella distinction often works with word counts, but that's useless to me, i have no way of knowing a book's word count. so i go by page counts instead, but there it's also difficult to be consistent. especially the 150-200 page range is a grey area. for instance, Chinatown by Thuận has 173 pages and i think of it as a novel, while Spear by Nicola Griffith, at 184 pages, feels more like a novella to me.
i think it might be a question of genre. with SFF books, my cutoff point is 200, while i tend to think of general fiction/"literary" fiction books as novels starting from about 160 pages.
the novel/novella distinction often works with word counts, but that's useless to me, i have no way of knowing a book's word count. so i go by page counts instead, but there it's also difficult to be consistent. especially the 150-200 page range is a grey area. for instance, Chinatown by Thuận has 173 pages and i think of it as a novel, while Spear by Nicola Griffith, at 184 pages, feels more like a novella to me.
i think it might be a question of genre. with SFF books, my cutoff point is 200, while i tend to think of general fiction/"literary" fiction books as novels starting from about 160 pages.