When I wrote “It’s Always 9/11, I didn’t think of it as a particularly long book. None of my readers mentioned its length. It’s a thriller after all, and it reads fast. So I was surprised to discover, once it was laid out for print, that it was 616 pages strong, (counting title pages, acknowledgements, copyrights, a reading guide, etc).

Big books are not fashionable these days—the average novel seems to run around 200 pages—but I love them. For the writer a big book gives you time to create complex, believable characters and settings and for the narrative arc to evolve organically. For the reader it’s an opportunity to immerse oneself in a fully realized fictional world. What could be better than a chilly rainy afternoon lost in a great book? (unless it’s lying on a hot sunny beach immersed in a great book).

And while I’m at it…I like real books, in all their paper glory. I like their feel in my hand. I like their smell. My cover designer Anne Weinstock and layout editor Kristen Weber did great work that enhances both It’s Always 9/11 and Wrong Highway. Their craft would be totally lost in an electronic book —it’s like a MP3 compared to a vinyl album. The same goes for audio books and more so. Not that there’s anything wrong with listening to a story—but it’s passive entertainment. When you read, yes, the author’s done a lot of work but so do you, the reader, translating those words on the page into that fully realized fictional world. That magic is why the written word was invented, why its thrived, why little kids learn to read.

If I get huge requests for an electronic version of It’s Always 9/11, I’ll publish one. But for right now, I’m really happy with my big thick book and its enticing cover.